Thankfully we were not awoken during the night due to an earthquake. We ventured down from the 25th floor apartment and headed for the nearby plaza de armas. The weather was fantastic. For midwinter and less than an hour's drive to all of Chile's major ski resorts it was quite surprising. The only sensible decision was to eat in a cafe outside.
After being fed and watered like a slightly alcoholic plant, we headed to the bus terminal to try and buy our tickets for Mendoza in Argentina. The bus terminal was much further away than what we thought and we had to take the metro. For a single journey, as far as you want to go, was only about 80p (England take note). In the bus terminal we learned that the bus we wanted was not available at all. During the winter they don't run night buses over into Argentina as you have to traverse the Andes and it gets too icy. This meant that we had to book ourselves into another night in Santiago and get an early morning bus. Not a big issue but a slight inconvience.
We headed back towards the plaza for where our walking tour was going to start from. The tour was quite interesting and took us a long way around downtown Santiago. Our guide was a bit impartial however which was slightly disappointing. They work for tips and he lost his tip with this one very avoidable mistake. Our tour group was very large and thus we struggled to hear him some of the time. The tour guide said how safe Santiago was (Not entirely what we had heard - "watch out for pickpockets" is what we'd heard a fair amount) and a Mexican guy piped up and basically slammed Europe and the US for the amount of terrorism we receive. I didn't realise that Mexico was such a safe place that isn't entirely run by cartels...
We left the tour at the end and started the reasonably long walk back towards our apartment. We had eyed up a pizza place that neighboured the apartment block. This pizza place did not disappoint at all. I have never seen so much mince meat on one pizza. It was pretty delicious. We packed our things in the apartment and headed down to try and get a taxi to our next airbnb. It was a lot closer to the bus station so that we don't have to go so far early in the morning. We asked the receptionist to order us a taxi. He called a few numbers before telling us that the taxis didn't want to do the journey... a bit suspicious but we rolled with it. We went onto the street to try and order a taxi. We were told the exact same thing by a taxi driver... Why did these taxi drivers not want to go over to that area?
We were left with no choice. We had to get the metro. Not exactly what we wanted to do with our large bags but we didn't have a choice. Thankfully, this went surprisingly well. The metro isn't quite as busy as a London one but it's still pretty busy. We just sort of stood in a corner and hoped that not everyone hated us. Our accommodation was pretty easy to find on the other side and we settled into the apartment nicely. Chile has been quite interesting and I'm excited to now move onto Argentina.
