The eating continues: Santiago de Chile, part 2

As I mentioned in Santiago de Chile part 1, eating was a recurring theme on my to-do list for the short weekend we had planned in the Chilean capital. After shopping for about 5 hours non-stop (hey, I live in Buenos Aires, shopping culture doesn’t exist here), we were starving and needed food and alcohol. Our hotel was located right next to *gasp* La Fuente Alemana! I swear I didn’t plan this! After having watched Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations episode in Sanitago, we had already planned on going to get our pork sandwich on the following day in the downtown location….little did we know there were TWO locations, the other one being in Providencia.

La Fuente Alemana is a pretty impressive joint. The waitresses are also the cooks. They take your order, then go behind the counter and make it. Hey, strange system but it seems to work, and they can’t blame the kitchen for being slow. La Fuente also offers their own home-brewed beer in a large, thirst-quenching glass.

But the real stars are the pork sandwiches or sandwiches de lomito. Piled with mayonnaise, avocado, sauerkraut, tomato and thin slices of juicy, braised pork. I could barely finish mine, but believe me, I did.

So after eating huge amounts of pork and slurping beer, the best thing to do is get outside and take a walk. We decided to check out Cerro San Cristóbal for an amazing view of the city. I was wary about climbing up the hill…I didn’t have the best hiking shoes, so we took the cable car to the top. FYI: heights + Kelly = bad idea. It wasn’t even that high, I mean, the train is on a track, you never leave the ground, but you do go at quite an incline and you have the illusion that you could just fall off the hill and float into space if you weren’t holding on tight enough (or was that just my illusion?)

But once you’re on top, the view is worth all the panic attacks in the world! The mountains are gorgeous, and just the fact that you can see them from almost any part of the city changes your entire perspective. In Buenos Aires when I look up, the only thing I tend to see is a crazy, runaway bus barreling towards me. There’s no escaping! But in Santiago, all you have to do is lift your head to know that the whole world is out there, and in comparison to these magestic mountains, you and your problems are just dust in the breeze.

Put down the mate, pick up the mote. Santiago, Part 1.

I have to admit something. These past two weeks I’ve been depressed. You see, two weeks ago, the husband and I took a fabulous weekend trip to Santiago de Chile, which during we took tons of pictures (which is really difficult for us) but when we got back home…the camera was nowhere to be found! I was sooo upset that we had lost the pictures of this trip, the best entire trip of my life! So, you can understand why I’ve been avoiding blogging these last few days….what’s there to write about?

Fast-forward to this evening, I decided to give one last look around the house before calling it quits, so I open up my junk drawer, which is filled with papers, sand (yes sand, don’t ask), coins, pencils and other odds and ends, and which I’ve looked through a 1,000 times, and voilá! what do I see? My precious camera with all my Santiago pics! Life is good again.