Santiago 101

As I promised, I´ll be posting some pictures of Chile. I´ll start with Santiago, Chile´s capital city and where I live. I took this photos today while driving to and from school, this is not really Santiago´s typical pictures, but more the places I see day to day. Keep in mind Santiago is a huge city, one of the largest in South America. Santiago, has it´s own World Trade Center, which is part of the financial district of the city, called informaly Sanhattan. Sanhattan has a couple of big buildings, and two more are being constructed right now. One of them will be the biggest one in Chile. According to Wikipedia, this is downtown, according to Chileans, downtown is far down from this area, at least 3 or 4 kilometers. Just a walk away, 15 blocks or less, you can find Pedro de Valdivia. Pedro de Valdivia is a rather old street, where you can still find stone streets and big trees, is definitely worth a walk if you are around. In Pedro de Valdivia you can also find some budget hotels, although in it´s best times, it was a street for rich people, that is why you can see some really nice old houses. Nowadays those buildings are used as offices or even embassys. Even though stone roads are a bit romantic, you can have a bad time during rain, unless you drive like Colin McRae, which I do (lol!). In the picture at the left you can find one of our newest public buses, they carry fancy led signs and are white (they used to be yellow). People say the new transportation system sucks, it seems they changed 7 thousand buses for 5 thousand new ones, I wonder why it sucks…

Coming back home, I was harrased by a group of traditional journalists, it seemed they wanted to kidnap me. Is not an easy task being part of the indie media and part time blogger in Chile. I managed to escape, but I´m sure they will try this again