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2/05/2006
~ Jeremy
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Well… I have committed a cardinal Teeuwsen.com sin. I went to Chile and didn’t post anything about it. No stories, no pictures, no notice…
First no pictures, because I forgot my camera. I tried to buy one, but the only one there was an underwater camera and the lady behind the counter wouldn’t sell it to Gringos. Not a very nice lady.
So here is my story…
First we land and we have to go through customs. I am of course searched, because in my suitcase are 4 hard drives replacements for the server that I have to setup. Needless to say the customs people don’t speak very good English and I don’t really speak Spanish at all other then Hola. After some very awkward conversations I ended up paying a bunch of money so that I could bring the hard drives in and everything was ok.
Taxi driver took me to my hotel. Along the way most of the houses I saw were small, crowded and squished together. There was quite a few little shacks and odd little homes and garbage in the river and generally quite poor. Then we drove through a long long tunnel came out the other side into their new downtown. It was like entering a new world. They had all kinds of nice huge skyscrapers, fancy hotels, restaurants, and nice cars. The downtown is really nice and they have people constantly cleaning. In the morning when I would walk to work there would be someone mopping the sidewalks and then when I cam home at night someone else would be picking up any leaves that may of fallen during the day.
Side note: Almost all of the cars in Santiago are new. The increased emissions standards and all the old ones were no longer allowed. However cars in are cheap. A lot of people buy Hyundai’s for approx. $8000. There is no tax on cars as they do not manufactuer cars in Chile. As well they have just signed a deal with China where they will be buying a new Chines car for about $3000 or $4000. Crazy…
Anyway, my hotel was really nice. I barely had to open a door the entire time I was there. When I walked into my hotel room there was a Kitchen and beside it a living room. Through the sliding doors was my bedroom, then down a mini hallway with two closets was my big bathroom. I had three phones all in the most necessary locations, beside my bed, beside the couch, and beside the toilet. The phone by the toilet was actually easier to get to then the toilet paper.
The first two days there I went on a couple of tours. One of Santiago (older part of town) and one to the beach. The city tour was pretty good, but they don’t have a lot of really old architecture. There are some nice buildings and a big church, but I believe a lot of it was destroyed during earthquakes and each building looks like it was designed by a different society and hardly any of it looks Spanish.
The second tour was the beach tour. We drove through the country side and learned about their wine making. I guess there is an formally extinct grape that the French use to use all of the time in their best wines and was thought to be lost until just recently. They discovered the Chileans were using it in some of their wines. So the French brought it back to France and tried to grow it so that they could again make some of specialty old wines, but with no success. As it would turn out they only place it grows is in Chile. The tour guide is confident that Chile will be really famous for the new wines that they will be releasing using exclusively this special grape.
On the beach tour, I got to run through the ocean, sit on the beach for a little bit, see some more interesting architecture and hear tones of stories about things that happened or that they had discovered or lost. Now this would be the time that the camera would come in handy, but… well… you know. I might have to go back again and if I do I will take lots of pictures and I will write more. :-) To note in one of the towns we went to it had the most diverse architecture yet including a community of Victorian homes that the British built when trying to start a colony.
Well the rest of my trip was less exciting. I worked a lot, met some really nice people at the place where I worked and they took me out for some good food. I also only bought one present and it was for Kim, not you. A bracelet and necklace made with Lapis Lazuli.
Now I promise to keep everyone a little more informed especially as soon there will be a new Teeuwsen in the world. Boy or Girl we don’t know yet, but life is about to get a little crazier.
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