It´s chilly in Chile!!

Valparaiso, Chile,

We are here, Chile!
The first two days we spent in Santiago, the capital. Well, there´s the up-town part and the down-town part. We´ve seen both and it was not really impressive, as far as I am concerned. It lacked a ceratin atmosphere, it´s not cosy or authentic or anything like that. It´s a big city, with some better and nice parts, but that´s bassically it. Downtown had a plaza the Armes, like every other South-American city or town. They all look the same too. One a bit bigger than the other but that´s basically it. This one I think is one of the less interesting I´ve been to.

Funny: last night in Santiago there was an earthquacke 6.2 om the Richter scale. And I slept right through it! Didn´t feel a thing. I think that´s kinda weird, but it must mean that I had a good night sleep! The guy in the room next to us heard me going to the toilet in the middle of the night right after the quacke. The next morning he asked me if we felt it too and he thought it had woken me up. And straingly enough we were totally surprised by this news. Absolutely didn´t feel a thing. While we were talking about it there was a very light afterschock, as the glasses started to rinckle. Quackes in Chile are very common. Today we arrived in Valparaiso, a city 2 hours north of Santiago. It´s very nice. It has all these little hills you can reach by sort of little trains. And the neighbourghood up where we are right now is very colourful.

Brrrrrrrrrrrr, actually going into parts of the world where it is winter while back home the summer will be amongst us (well not me this time, but you guys) in a short while (and I am always waiting on the summer to come around) goes against everything I believe in :-). And oh yes it´s pretty chilly in Chile...going further down south as planned in a couple of days will not make in any less cold....! And therefore we will go into the driest desert of the world first (to warm up a bit), the Atacama desert. There we will visit geysers, flamingo´s, saltlakes and some other stuff. I´m a desert kinda girl, so I´m looking forward to that!

Well, off to get myself a bite to eat. Keep you posted!
Pictures will follow soon, if I can figure out how to make them smaller :-)
Love, Ellen