Santiago

At last! Touch down in the hot mediterranean climate of Santiago, and nobody was sending us back. After 3 months without a familiar face I was excited to be in the company of very good family friends, or should I say my surrogate family in Chile. Renato was there to meet us and if disturbed by the volume of luggage he would have to fit into his car he didn't show it. We stopped by at Astrid's apartment for a beautiful evening meal, putting the less than sociable but tired out Leo down for his bedtime. It was wonderful to see them all, our families have known each other for years and we have witnessed each other growing up, so bringing Leo to meet them was part of the continuum. And what a comfort to be amongst friends again. We slept soundly that night, and looked forward to a restful time from here on.

And we were not proved wrong. Our friends played perfect hosts to us as we sprawled ourselves out in their territory, used their facilities and generally took over their lives for the following 3 weeks (thanks guys for everything, you are forever welcome in our little English home).

I think we were ample distraction for Paula who was sitting university finals and Maria Paz who bunked off her last week of school before the summer holidays to hang out with us. Leo especially busied himself entertaining with his consummate skills at crawling, bouncing and babbling. He even had a few dips in the swimming pool, by now a favourite past time. 

I was 19 when I last visited this ol' town, and I struggled to recall strong memories of the locations I had frequented. Maybe it's because I've done a good job of frying my brain over the subsequent 'university intoxication' years or maybe it's because the city itself has had a bit of a facelift. Renato told us that a great deal of construction had taken place over the last 11 years, much like the rest of the modern world I expect. But the general appearance was clean, new, sprightly, quite a pleasant modern metropolis. The other trick that played havoc with my memory was that my last visit was over the winter months, when everything had a more gloomy aspect to it, as the oppressive smog hovers over the skyline due to the lack of air current between the mountains that sandwich Santiago city. 

Inbetween naps and siestas we managed to fit in a little sightseeing, the city view from el Cerro San Cristobal, the Plaza de Armas, a lovely pre Columbian art museum and the colonial splendour of the church of Los Dominicos and the pretty arts and crafts market nearby.

And that's about it. After nearly 4 months of travelling can one be sightseeing'd out? I suspect so. 
But we had great fun just 'hanging with the kids' instead. Ari displayed his competitive streak when we were introduced to the Wii for the first time, who'd have thought that a game called Rayman Raving Rabbids could have caused a grown man to act so juvenilely? And I'm not even going to speak about Guitar Hero. I just hope Leo had his eyes closed at all times. We also learned about how 'da youf' live in Santiago and Chile in general, so you could say we had a cultural experience nonetheless. A veritable win win situation methinks.