Santiago Stopover

For those that were wondering - we weren't on the plane in Madrid that crashed. Santiago is in Chile, which is in South America. Madrid is in Spain. I guess they do both speak Spanish though.

We have had a crash since being here - but that is of a different kind. The kind where you have had no sleep on a 17 hour plane flight and then you hit your hotel room at 3:30pm and just.. well... crash.

We ended up sleeping through till about 3am this morning, and then I was just a bit too restless to be stuck in bed while in a new city, so I tried to take some night photos from the fire escape and then just annoyed Rose for the next 4 hours till we officially got up. She pretended not to like it, but deep down she loved having her precious sleep interupted by an overly excited little boy.... really.

I had mapped out an outline of what we would do today, and had tried to assure an anxious Rose that we would not get pickpocketted, the water WAS safe to drink, and NO we would not be struck by any avalanches coming down the Andes. (Although if we did, I would be protected with my new avalanche proof jacket of course)

We walked to a nearby shopping mall that is labelled the best in South America.. which sounds impressive until you think that its main rivals are probably in Sau Paulo and La Paz, and are probably better known for their armed holdups than their plethora of shops.  Rose looked in a few girlie shops - but I had a mission. I had forgotten to buy a power adapter for Chile so I had no way of recharging my laptop and cameras. This was driving me crazy. Ben in a new city without a camera is like Rose leaving the country without beauty products worth a similar value to the GDP of Uruguay. It makes me cranky. So with my one track mind well into gear, I set about trying to defy my lack of Spanish and find one of the silly things. It took me a lot of blank stares and a lot of wrong advice before finally I stumbled across a Bunnings like store that sold it! The planet's were once again aligned.

This afternoon we wandered around the city and found a crepe cafe that and had a nice lunch - and then wandered back to the hotel eventually and stuck my legs in the new power adapter hoping to recharge them.