March 29, 2014
10.06am
Luca and I got off the bus, but it wasn’t our stop, there are two in Santiago. We are almost there. During the trip I didn’t last long and fell asleep, but Luca says that coming here he saw factories, livestocks, rice fields and nice houses. The bus is luxurious. And the toilet at the station is better than what you would find in Italy.
5h11pm We’ve been looking for a place to eat for an hour. At the end we came to the “Pollo al Carbon”, not really a change from what we’ve eaten so far. We’ve been a couple of hours at a pub to drink beer and plan the rest of the holiday. 500$ (almost 10 euro) for two beers and a packet of 10 cigarettes. What! Well, these are the prices at the places Western-style.
The place where we are now is a chicken fast food; it has yellow and fuchsia walls, and tables of the same colors. I like it! In Santiago there isn’t much to see. The folklore museum is closed for renovations. Since we arrived and left the luggage at our hotel, about 5 hours ago, we saw the cathedral, the fortress, the park with a statue built by Trujillo (the former dictator) as self-satisfaction and that is now a monument to heroes.
We’ve decided to go to Constanza tomorrow, a bit South, in the mountains, and later we’ll come back North along the coast.
Santiago is big. We realized that when we got off the bus. From the map it looked like the hotel was close, but it was at the other side of the town and it took us one hour to get there, with backpacks and weariness that made all more difficult. Near the station, just out of the centre, there are many shopping malls, Mc. Donald’s and big banks. Everywhere smartphones, icecreams, basket fields, florists with real flowers. It feels like Europe.
