Santiago, Chile

From late November to late December, we spent one month (minus a weekend in Atacama) in Santiago, the capital of Chile. We stayed in a nice Airbnb that was reasonably cheap and had great views of the surrounding mountains, although the area directly surrounding it was fairly loud/crowded and not the nicest place to walk around. While there were some things we really liked about Santiago (great parks, good places for Davy to go running, pretty mountains nearby, no rain, and a few cute neighborhoods we enjoyed), overall it was not our favorite city. It felt much more crowded than Buenos Aires and wasn’t as good of a walking city, and it was also surprisingly expensive. In contrast to Buenos Aires, we cooked most meals which was good in terms of being healthy. We also joined a gym nearby and got in the habit of exercising nearly every morning (due to being two hours ahead of EST, we didn’t have to start work until a little later). One big highlight of Santiago was that we had our first visitors! Shari’s sister Maya and brother-in-law Mike came to visit for our last few days in Santiago, which was lots of fun.

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Similar to our Buenos Aires post, we won’t run you through a day by day of our whole month in Santiago since probably nobody would read this blog afterwards, but we’ll mention some of our favorite things we did:

Old things tour day. Our first weekend day was spent on an “old things” themed walking tour of the city. We first walked by La Moneda (the presidential palace which we later toured) and Plaza de Armas (the center square that had a beautiful old cathedral), and we then made our way to Empanadas Zunino (the oldest empanada place in Santiago) for a tasty empanada treat. They only have two kinds of empanadas here (which you eat standing up wherever you can find space), but they were large and delicious. Afterwards we made our way to La Piojera, which is one of the oldest dive bars in the city. We were somewhat worried it would be touristy, but it seemed like pretty much everyone there was a local. La Piojera is known for one drink called the “terremoto” (earthquake). Although we did not know this before drinking this strange-looking beverage, a terremoto is basically sweet wine, fernet, grenadine, and pineapple ice cream. Anyone who has more than one is probably clinically unwell (or will become clinically unwell after the second drink), but we enjoyed the experience.

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Piknic Electronik. This was a fun monthly daytime electronic music party at a really beautiful park in Santiago. We saw that a DJ we like was playing and decided to get tickets. The event was really well done and had different food and drink stands, comfy places to sit and hang out, and even a DJ school for kids.

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Cerro San Cristobal. This is probably the most famous park in Santiago and one of the biggest (if not the biggest). The closest entrance was only a 30min walk from our Airbnb and started in a one of our favorite areas called Bellavista. The park has a giant hill with amazing views of the city, and you can either walk/jog/bike up a path (Davy would regularly jog) or take a “funicular” and/or a cable car to the top. We took the funicular to the top with Maya and Mike on Christmas day and had a nice picnic atop the mountain.

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Barrio Italia. This neighborhood is known as the “hip” neighborhood that’s the “Brooklyn of Santiago,” so obviously we were curious to check it out. It was about a 30min walk from our Airbnb and had about two main intersecting streets that you could walk down. The area is filled with lots of cute outdoor cafes and small shops and boutiques that are often hidden from the main street (i.e. you would enter a building and walk down a hallway to find an indoor courtyard with many cute shops). We scoped it out once on our own and then went back with Maya and Mike on their first day in Santiago.

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Barrio Yungay. If Barrio Italia is the Brooklyn of Santiago, then Barrio Yungay is more like the Bushwick of Santiago. Barrio Yungay is a quiet area with street art and some nice outdoor cafes. It also has the Museum of the Memory, which is a museum about the past dictatorship in Chile and the human rights violations that occurred. We really wanted to learn more about this and therefore thought the museum would be a great place to do so. While we definitely learned a lot, the museum had a LOT of information that was not very well organized, so that made it somewhat difficult to take everything in.

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Los Dominicos Village. This was a cute artisan market in an area of Santiago called Las Condes. An added bonus was that Lime scooters recently arrived to Santiago, but only in this area, so we were able to scoot our way to the market (Shari scooting very slowly, though. Safety first). When we first arrived at the market we saw a pretty sad flea market with people selling used home goods and were somewhat confused/disappointed, but we eventually figured out that the artisan market was located behind this and ended up having a grand time.

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La Moneda. This is the presidential palace and is where the president and some other high-ranking government officials work. You can get a free tour of La Moneda which was pretty cool. La Moneda was bombed in the coup of 1973, so it was interesting to see what areas were destroyed and rebuilt and hear more about the history.

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Although Santiago was not our favorite city, we still enjoyed ourselves quite a bit and were happy to have visited. One of the downsides of working remotely and having to ensure you have a good place to stay/work from is that it does not allow for as many spontaneous changes of plans, but it obviously has other perks! In general it is also nice to have longer stays in cities to be able to explore past the main tourist sites and get a feel for the city.

SPICY BONUS PICS

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