South America Blog: Day 2
Saturday, January 16 (Santiago, Chile)
Our plane landed in the morning in Santiago. My first time outside of North America in over 21 years! With only a few hours of fitful sleep under our belts, we stumbled out into the terminal, only to be greeted by an unruly horde of people waving signs, and hawking taxi services. One guy, who was standing right next to the security clearance and appeared to be airport security, kindly helped pull our luggage through the crowd. Soon, we realized that he wasn’t airport security at all - just another opportunistic entrepreneur. He was expecting a tip, and Shelley gave him 10,000 of our newly procured Chilean pesos (after pooh-poohing Shelley’s initial offer of a 100 peso coin). Shortly thereafter, I figured that 100 pesos was about a quarter, so Shelley had tipped the guy about US$20. Shelley is no longer allowed to spend pesos without supervision.
Although there were no Scrabblers on our flight, we ran across Richard Popper at the baggage claim, and found out that there were a bunch of Scrabblers on a flight from Atlanta arriving at basically the same time as us. We tried to find a reputable-seeming outfit with a van for 5 to get to the Radisson economically. We got a quote for 22,000 pesos (under $50), which seemed pretty reasonable. Then we heard Jan Dixon had a van for 7 for $44, so we jumped for it. We started to load up our stuff, and it soon became evident that it was really just a van for 5 like the one we were trying to arrange, probably for the same price. The taxi operator who said the van would hold 7 obviously didn't account for 2 weeks worth of luggage for each person! Since our luggage was largely still to be loaded, we volunteered to take our own taxi, for which we ended up paying US$36. Not unreasonable, but still a lot more expensive than a van. Had we just got a taxi ourselves as soon as we got to the terminal, we’d also have saved 30+ minutes waiting for everyone else to get their baggage!
Santiago is a nice city to spend a day - at least the part where we were staying. Lots of very modern office buildings, well-kept and cosmopolitan. After Shelley conked out for several hours, we went to forage for dinner, and found a great seafood restaurant called Coco Loco. According to my trusty Oxford Spanish-English pocket dictionary (a wise last-minute buy for 2 people spending 17 days in Spanish-speaking countries who do not speak the language!), it means either Crazy Coconut, Crazy Head, or Crazy Bogeyman. A word Shelley should have learned is vaso (glass), because she inadvertently ordered a botella (bottle) of wine instead.
To abate the drunkenness, we went on a circuitous walk back to the hotel. We walked through the upscale club neighbourhood on the way back, where you would expect guys wearing half-unbuttoned silk shirts would drive their Porsches. We took a few pictures of us in front of the Starbucks, just to make Winter jealous.