South America - Santiago, Chile

Edit to Cairns: How could I forget this.. :D On the second night, I was awakened by a rustling sound, of course Tom didn't hear it.. So I lay down again. A minute later, there was another rustling sound.. I suspected it came from a plastic bag next to the garbage can and threw a shoe at it. When nothing else moved, I lay down again and hoped for a quiet night.. But no, it kept rustling. Tom also heard it by now and knocked the bag out. And behold, a cockroach came running out. Typical cockroach, it was quite fast :D Hoping to scare it away and remove the incentive for it to stay, we took out the trash at 2 AM. It didn't help. At some point, I heard scratching again, which was closer than before. Getting a little paranoid, right? That was at least Tom's opinion. When I turned on the flashlight on my phone again, the cockroach was actually sitting on the nightstand and was helping itself to my gummy bears! I didn't want the remaining 10 from the bag anymore :( After I emptied the nightstand and the gummy bears were also in the trash, the cockroach also left.
So it wasn't a particularly good night..

Now back to Santiago!

After a 12-hour flight, we landed in Chile at 11:15 AM. We theoretically had to kill half a day to adjust to the new time... It didn't work. At 2 PM, exhausted from the trip (ordering an Uber without internet didn't work and after 30 minutes of trying, we gave up and took a taxi), we lay in bed and slept until 11 PM - only to be awake again for a few hours and then go back to sleep for the last 3 hours. And so it went for the next 2 days until we finally got into the rhythm. Since Tom was sick, we didn't do much except for shopping up to now.

So that we could see something at all, I dragged Tom out of bed and we went to the Sky Costanera Center - a skyscraper from which you can see the whole city and the Andes in the background. In the neighboring building was a mall where we equipped ourselves with winter clothes for Patagonia on the last day.
The view from the Sky Costanera was really great. We were relatively late at the 'place to be', so we saw the city in light and dark. Thanks to our student status and Wednesday, the fun only cost €7 instead of €15 :)
The next day we went to Cerro San Cristobal, the larger of the two hills in downtown Santiago. We took the cable car up, which cost €3 per person and made the difficult way up significantly easier for us. From the cable car, you also had a good view of the huge city. At the summit, similar to Rio de Janeiro, there is a holy figure, only smaller and female. The park on the mountain is beautiful and you can linger a bit and enjoy the view. On the way back, we walked down the mountain and were glad that we didn't walk up :D - it was quite steep. Back down, we also visited the adjacent neighborhood of Bellavista, which was very nice with many restaurants and cafes (but also quite touristy, it seemed to us). The Forestal Park, where a flea market occasionally takes place on Sundays (not the Sunday we were there), is small but at least green. In the Barrio Lastarria neighborhood, we also had dinner once. We tried to find something Chilean without knowing what typical Chilean food is. The success was that we found a Chilean, and then ended up at an Italian restaurant. But the pizza tasted great 😅🖒

Cerro Lucia was also particularly beautiful, the smaller green hill in Santiago, on which there is a castle with green gardens, many steep stairs, fountains, and a church. We loved it here!

We also took a little city tour since our Airbnb room was centrally located. So we walked to Plaza de Armas and also visited the Metropolitan Cathedral, then continued to Mercado Central and finally walked back to the apartment in a kind of diplomatic neighborhood..