Dia numero nueve

After arriving in Santiago last night, we slept in and got a nice breakfast at the Sheraton before deciding what we would do for the day. For some reason, we had it in our heads that we were leaving tomorrow and so needed to plan two days of activities, but needed to be at the airport by 6:30pm tomorrow. Despite a well planned trip up to this point, I had forgotten to plan our time in Santiago, so we had a bit of a scramble to come up with a plan. We decided that the city itself seemed interesting, but would not be exciting enough to just walk around, so we wanted to go to a vineyard outside of Santiago. Before we left, I had found a bike and wine tour on TripAdvisor, so we looked for that. We ended up finding a different company altogether, La Bicicleta Verde, and called them to check on reservations. Only after telling Mac, an employee of Bicicleta, that we could not do a wine tour the next day because we had a flight did we realize that we didn't know what day it was. It was in fact Thursday, not Friday as we had thought! 24 extra hours, what a surprise!


Fortunately, Mac was also American and was able to point us in the direction of a few good restaurants and some things to do and see in Santiago. We had lunch at an awesome outside square on Avenida Bellevista and then spent the rest of our day ascending to and mostly climbing down from Cerro San Cristobal, which is a large hill in Santiago with a statue of the Virgin Mary on the top that overlooks the entire city and the mountains. As you can see from the pictures, Cerro San Cristobal offered a number of incredible views that I may or may not have gone photo crazy on. The walk down was beautiful, but looooong. We estimated it at about 4-5 kilometers, which would put us at close to 10 km of walking for the day! Needless to say, we were tired when we reached the bottom, but were very happy that we had made the trip. Of course our slow walk down the hill was nothing in comparison to the countless number of Chileans that we saw running or cycling up and then down the hill. 5 kilometers of continuous uphill running would be absolutely brutal and both Sammar and I agreed that there was no way that we could do it, which led us to propose a fitness challenge for ourselves for the next few months.






To reward ourselves for all of our walking, we decided to visit a highly recommended steakhouse called Fogon del Gaucho, but it may as well have been called Heaven. The Argentinean style of preparation which Fogon utilizes produces an incredibly delicious taste that neither Sammar or I have ever experienced before(Sammar's expression says it all!). Oh, and did I mention that an incredible 8 oz. filet was only $16!!!! We learned later that the beef is seasoned only with salt, but is uniquely cooked in a long, slow process. The large grill that is used has four separate areas. The furthest left is a raging fire using only wood, which as it burns down creates hot embers that are caught below the fire and distributed amongst the rest of the grill to create a hot, medium and cool section. The steaks pass through each of these four areas to create an incredible taste that keeps in all of the steaks natural juices. Some day, maybe we will have to make this type of grill in our backyard, and we are immediately looking into how we can get these incredible steak cuts from Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. The food was so delicious that we decided that nothing else could top it for the night and decided that we should return to the hotel and go to sleep(note: we are not incredibly lame, we finished dinner at 12:30am).



Check out the rest of the day's pictures here! ()