Santiago

Santiago is beautiful, or at least the Bellavista/Vitacura/Las Condes areas we're in.  Bellavista is at the bottom of the big hill park that you can take a cable car up.  Vitacura is like a Mount Royal suburban area but transplanted to California.  Beauty.  Las Condes is clean, chic, new, ritzy.  Reminds me of downtown San Diego.  We hit up a Juan Valdez coffee shop that was a beautful, large, modern, ultra stylish retail location (two blocks from a two story Starbucks).  The counter girl spoke some english too.  Basically everyone does.  It's clean, not too crowded, orderly.  Traffic isn't crazy, it's north american style follow the rules, not mayhem.  Overall it just feels of a place that royally has it's sh-t together.  Especially in these neighbourhoods, it's so first world.  The modernity, ambiance, general buzz and activity make Calgary feel "behind" for comparison.  

Didn't get many pics in the center of town, but there's plenty of monuments, big business buildings, parks complete with totally well behaved stray dogs (honestly, it's like they're citizens and part of society - they just exist in orderly fashion, at least during the hot sun during the day).  In history if you needed to be saved from feugo, here's what did it.

Bellavista is the grungy art scene place.  Pablo Neruda hung out here back in the day, and if you're a Pablo Neruda in the making, here again is the place to be.  Not sure what the trucks were, other than funny.  Blocks and blocks of Bellavista have funny murals/grafitti.  They're really into faces - human, cartoonish, animal/bug blends, Dali-like-deformity, etc.

The park had a lot of nice hiking trails, and biking through it would have been nice too.  A bunch of kids make jumps all over, although they don't seem to have the cycling/engineering/Evel Knievel skill level of jump building.  It's more Napoleon Dynamite and Sledgehammer-esque.  But enough kids build those... and they start one-upping each other... and next thing you know it becomes downhill biking.

The hotel has a pool on the roof in the sun, which is providing some needed R&R time after exercise.  Napping quite a bit, dealing with a few work emails, and a rental car issue that screwed up and failed to get the drive to Argentina permit so it might have to be by bus.  Reading "The Greatest Trade Ever" by Greg Zuckerman, about the meltdown and John Paulson's, and others', big big bet shorting the markets.  Actually really enjoying that even on vacation.  I packed my charger adapters for my Macbook Air, but left the actual charger at home.  Oops.  Had to go to a mall near where I biked out of town to pick one up, tried two stores there (a Mac store and a local electronics chain).  Neither had them.  The electronics chain had one at their location that was 5km back the other way, and coincidentally only a couple minutes from the hotel.  We lunched on the terrace of the mall overlooking the Andes listening to a talented lady singing a mix of Christmas carols and 80's tunes (Frosty the Snowman feels different with sunglasses and sandals on a chic patio restaurant than it does in Calgary in December).  Leaving the packed mall and merging onto the freeway, we saw a Mac outlet shop where they service Macs instead of just selling them.  We looped back through the neighbourhoods, and coincidentally, the Mac outlet is right near Wisconsin Street.  Go figure.  Anyway, they didn't have it either, so off to the store that did... finally met with success (at a price, yikes!).

No shortage of fine dining - did italian and sushi and local type foods so far.  Vino is cheap and good.  We came home to a rocking christmas show that doesn't show up here, but lights were pointing hundreds of meters into the sky, carols were going, light shows were projected onto nearby buildings, etc.  We're right across from a concert hall type place in a nice part of town.