After a quick drive back to Atlanta, we finally set off for the international portion of our trip – first stop, Santiago! In actuality, our first stop was Miami for a much more affordable flight… nevertheless, we had a rather uneventful day in Miami, then a 2hr layover in Houston before our eventual 10hr flight to Santiago. Since we’ll be in South America for 2 months, we had to be pretty mindful of our packing – on the flip side, I also didn’t want to lug around so much luggage across the many places we’ll be seeing, so we also condensed to just the bare necessities. What this meant was that we did in fact over-pack the van on our trip around the US, and all we needed was the four bags you see below. Go figure!

Our first day in Santiago was pretty uneventful, what with getting settled into our Airbnb, doing some grocery shopping, etc. Turns out I know a lot less Spanish than I thought, and coupled with the slightly different Chilean Spanish spoken here… it’s a bit more difficult to communicate than anticipated. No matter though, since we have translation apps to save the day!

The next day we started our wandering around the city, starting with some local markets. It’s been a while since we’ve been in crowded alleys where you can haggle for a pound of chicken sitting out in the hot sun, so our first stop was not exactly our fondest memory. Afterwards though we did a great tour around the Lastarria neighborhood, where we got Rachel’s first Matcha Latte of the trip. We also toured the Museum of Fine Arts, which had a little too many modern art exhibitions for my tastes, but it was under heavy renovations so I can only assume the other classical pieces will be available to see later.

The next stop was Cerro Santa Lucia, where ostensibly the first fortification was built defining the footprint for what is now modern day Santiago. It’s a beautiful park in the middle of the city with lots of gardens, an overlook over the city at Castillo Hidalgo, and on the particular day we visited, a Capoeira demonstration!

At the request of a very famished Rachel, we made our way to Barrio Italia for some excellent gelato and to generally explore the area since we were thinking of switching up the Airbnb locations once our bigger party came in for Patagonia and beyond. One of the more unexpected things we ran across (so far…) was the renaissance festival that was happening in downtown Santiago. This brings the total number of “ren faires” we’ve been to in 2024 to 3, which I have to say was 3 more than I expected…

Anyway, back to Barrio Italia – the gelato was awesome, and really gave us the pep in our step we needed to continue exploring for the day. We ate some great food (my first lomo mechado was pretty nice!), had some interesting cocktails that would probably be legally defined as alcoholic smoothies in the US, but all that pales in comparison to the biggest find of the day… a Snoopy-themed Christmas market. I’m not quite sure what drew us in to this particular market out of the dozens we passed by, but our spidey-sense for weird places must have been tingling because we walked in and immediately saw an on-demand anime water bottle stall… weird. As we walk through this market, it became painfully clear that every stall was selling some Snoopy merch – keychains, t-shirts, samurai swords (ok maybe not this one, but it was probably there somewhere…) All-in-all I have never seen more Peanuts-themed merch in my entire life than was concentrated in the few thousand square feet of this random Chilean market… memorable to say the least!

This post is getting pretty long, so I’m going to skim over the next few days but generally we settled into living in Santiago pretty quick. Our gringo Spanish works well enough to get us to where we need and so we did a little sightseeing here and there in between getting ready for the next few trips.

• Walked to the Bicentennial Park – a really nice open area in northeastern Santiago for picnicking and generally being outdoors without a lot of physical effort
• Shopped in the Centro Costanera Mall – probably the least unique part of the experience, but it did get Rachel one new foreign grocery store experience added to her repertoire
• Hiked to Cerro San Cristobal – great park and hike up to a hill positioned centrally in Santiago with cablecars running to the top of the hill where a giant 22m statue of the Virgin Mary looks over the city

There’s lots more to say about Santiago and all the wonderful things to do around here, but that’s probably for a future blog post. Until then, we’re getting ready for an impromptu trip to Easter Island!