Day 47-49 Santiago de Chile

Santiago is a thriving modern city with a lot of European influence. The ressemblance with Europe is sometimes quite disturbing, in particular it has a feeling a bit like Barcelona. There are even some points from which Europe should learn, like how clean it is...
The city center has large pedestrian streets that are crowded even on a Sunday like today.

The charm of the city lies in its combination of modern and ancient buildings.

On sunday the municipality organises sport activities like "Spinning in the park"

Here the city suburbs with nice promenades and parks.

As you can see it's not always easy to find the way... At this point, we realised we were in the right street but in the wrong direction...

We walked 1 hour up to the city mirador, where we saw how big Santiago is...

Tired of the hiking, we decided to take the funicular down to the city, with a great view too.

For lunch we stoped at a "handycraft and gastronomic center", a very nice place with restaurants, bars and also handcrafts locals. A big chilean Steak waited for us!

On the way back, we took the metro, which is super clean and efficient! even more than in Europe! The weather was really hot in Santiago, 31 C in the afternoon... But as it's very dry, the climate is rather pleasant.

Again another of the nice posters of the chilean government against alcohol excess... chilean advertisers are kind of creative (on the poster: drinking alcohol in excess is as absurd as this...)

Here we are, in the middle of our journey to Patagonia ...we are approaching our aim!