Last Peek in Santiago

The day we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived. Throw on your gladrags, do a little dance in the street, scream with happiness... because MAMA has arrived! Yes indeed, Santiago is now terminally unsafe as the trio is reunited and ready to roll. Of course Mama is not staying in the hostel, mama is staying at a 4 star hotel downtown. Natch. But, it’s within walking distance so we had a lie-in and headed off (after missing breakfast) to meet her in the hopes of having brunch...

Mama was raring to go despite the 14 hour flight, so we headed to “the hill near Santa Lucia”. I still don’t know what its called, but it’s a park built around a hill with a pseudo castle ruin on top. Its absolutely beautiful with fountains and long sweeping staircases... until you get to the very top and the sweeping staircases suddenly morph into poky little mountain steps that have been worn slippery with age. Going up was easy if a bit tiring in the noon sun, but what goes up....must come down. Unfortunately. My choice of footwear for the day had been heavily influenced by the heat and thus I found myself teetering precariously on flip-flops with a small heel. I ended up pretty much lowering myself down step by step by the handrail – and even then I nearly went flying on one particularly steep and slippery slope. It was not a pretty and definitely not a graceful descent. Let’s just say that my 66 year old mother following a 14 hour flight was a damn sight more sprightly than me!

As usual when following my brother and a map – we ended up on what seemed like the never ending quest for the holy grail. The hostel had recommended the perfect breakfast place – i.e. one that was likely to be open on a Sunday mid-morning in catholic Santiago – but we never quite made it. We finally settled into a cafe next to the Bellas Artes museum and watched the people parade going by (2 girls begging for money – either as students or as hookers promising services, a goth pair with a pram, a woman with a see-through top having Chinese take-out on a bench, a heavily armoured police bus, backpackers, the homeless man trying to steal my brother’s drink over the fence of the cafe terrace...).

We dropped mama off a block from her hotel to have a Siesta. Oh, and did I mention that our room at the hostel has a TV? I took a picture with my watch in the foreground...to show the scale. It's about 5 metres from the beds, didn't know they could MAKE them that small! We met up with mum again for a dinner in the evening with the parents of Nadege - another of my brother’s friends/ex-colleagues. He’s got them EVERYWHERE.

Remember that impromptu tour of El golf that Juan and Maria treated us to on our first evening? Well, they pointed out Coco Loco – Santiago’s most expensive fish restaurant. Three guesses where we ended up having dinner tonight? Was it worth it? Definitely! It was the best piece of that-meal-just-cost-the-same-as-3-nights-in-a-B&B-for-3-people-with-private-bathroom-and-breakfast I’ve had since Bokhara in Delhi. Ka-ching!!!!