Updated From Last Night

So, I am redoing this post now that I am no longer having as much fun as I was last night when I originally wrote this. We started the day by going to downtown Santiago. The downtown there is very different than the downtowns in America. The scale was very small and felt more like Montrose than anything else. The area that we would recognize as a downtown is the financial district where all the skyscrapers are.

Our first stop was the Mercado Central.

 
It was in a really old building and smelt like fish. In the center of the building there were several restaurants that all shared the space a I was constantly being approached by the people that worked at them to come and eat. Apparently I don't look like someone that stands out because everyone kept approaching me and rambling along in Spanish assuming that I knew what they were saying.

Our next stop was the Museum of Fine Arts. It too was in a really old building and due to the earthquake quite a bit of it was closed. I got to see some of the art there as well as a really bizarre short film exhibit. It was in a large dark room with partitions and there were like 15 movies running all at once. The atrium of the building was really cool. It is the only picture I could take there because nobody was watching.

After the museum we went to a little restaurant and I had a ham sandwich and Alexis had a tomato empinada.

It was a really small place and we ate outside. There are a lot of random dogs wandering around the city, which included the patio of the restaurant where we were eating.

 

We then took the subway to Alexis' first architecture school to meet some of her friends. They were really nice and tried to make an effort to speak English. Not everyone here speaks as well as Alexis but I appreciate the effort that put forward. The subway was pretty clean compared to some of the other public transit systems I have been on.

This is Alexis trying to act casual while I took a picture of the subway...

After a day of roaming the city we went to eat at an Italian restaurant that was a small hole in the wall that I would have never known was a building you could go in let alone a restaurant. These types of places are called picadas. I had a thin crust pizza with anchovies, capers and black olives. It was really good but smelled horrible.

Earlier in the day we passed a student driver. I felt kind of bad for him because this has to be the worst place to learn to drive ever. He was going really slow and people here are not shy with the horn to let you know that you are not driving up to their individual standard that they feel is the one everyone should be using.

Finally we went to a place called Subterranea. It was in a really neat district of the city similar to Midtown. There I met more of Alexis' friends that were all really nice. One of aAlexis' friends, guy named Christian, was really nice. we talked about all kinds of stuff while Alexis and her friends danced. It was nice of him to entertain me while I was there and show me the strange system of ordering stuff from the bar. The place was really cool and was playing music that I was used to. Most of Alexis' friends there were from her high school so they all spoke English.

This is the view down the main road leading out of Alexis' neighborhood. The trees are turning now so it is really pretty. Everyone back home would kill me if I didn't take a picture of how nice it was.