Day 21 - 25, Santiago, Chile

It's a good feeling being back in Chile; it's still familiar in many ways, but also new to me and to Kai in many ways. The flight was uneventful (thankfully!) and we passed migration very quickly. Kai got his brand new passport stamped for the first time by a friendly lady, who saw we were staying in Maipu and was delighted as she was from Maipu herself. My uncle Omar was waiting for us outside already, and he took us home so we could nap, shower and have our first meal "a la chilena". Nothing fancy, and I'm sure I'm biased, but it was a beautiful steak with the most delicious salad on the side and some good red wine. My cousin Claudio was there too, and afterwards he took us on our first tour in Santiago: up the Cerro San Cristobal. My last time on this hill had probably been over 20 years ago, so it was a nice (re-)encounter with the city, although the pollution was clearly showing up again after what we were told were a few days of clear skies thanks to the rain that fell a few days prior. We then grabbed a beer in Bellavista (have we mentioned that Kai is starting to actually like beer??) and headed back home to see my aunt Toya and then to bed.

Second day in Santiago can be described as "food & drink comatose". We went over to my other aunts' house, where Tia Ana Maria and Tia Rosa were waiting for us with pisco sours, and a huge meal of pastel de papas, which some might say is Chile's answer to sheperd's pie. This was accompanied, again, with delicious salad of all types, and good red wine. We rolled down to Plaza Maipu aftewards and got ourselves a Chilean sim card, something we would highly recommend when you are travelling for a while in any country. In the evening we took the brand new metro from Plaza Maipu to Manuel Montt to meet up with some childhood friends, Carola and Vanessa as well as Daniel and Lorena in a gastro-pub in Santiago center, called Liguria. It's a really nice local place, with loads of food and drinks on offer. We still could not eat after the mega-lunch, but a pisco sour (grapefruit flavoured) and a couple of red wine bottles were in order!...