Santiago - just arrived

OK, I made it. Right now I think things are pretty good. The 'hotel' is (as I sort of knew) basically serviced apartments in a residential block. My apartment is nothing ultra fancy but it's pretty nice, especially for the money, and I have a fridge so I can go on a diet coke binge without upsetting anyone. :-) There's even a kitchen, not that I'm likely to use it.

I'm on the 18th floor so the view is fairly good, although only because I like that kind of thing and it's a bit of a novelty. I will take some photos later.

I just got the internet access working here; it's a wired connection to a cable modem. For ages it wasn't working and I have no idea why, but it seems OK now. The supplied ethernet cable looks like it's seen better days, so maybe bending the cable while I fiddled helped. Anyway. I did manage to get a wifi connection via some random network (one advantage of being up so high, I suppose :-) ) which was just about usable for e-mail, but painfully slow even for that. Still, it's good to have a backup.

The flight over was OK. From the airport to here was a mixed bag.

Customs here is very odd, unless I've forgotten a similar experience elsewhere. Unlike the Brazilian form, the form you fill in on the plane here seems logical and sensible and defines what you need to declare. My remaining coffee, chocolate and Polos didn't seem to need declaring, so I didn't. When I got to customs, it turns out that regardless of your answers (none of this 'something to declare/nothing to declare' channel system as in the UK, and in Brazil too) you are expected to put your own bags on some sort of X-ray-looking machine, then (although I didn't know this) you hand your form to someone at the output end of the machine. While hanging around trying to figure out WTF was going on, I spotted a customs official, showed him my coffee and asked if I had to declare it and he said yes. So I filled in a new form, put my stuff through the X-ray machine and showed my coffee, chocolate and Polos to the customs officer on the far side, who seemed a bit amused but let me go.

The knowledge is no use to me know, but I guess the lesson is that here in Chile you might as well err on the side of caution as it causes no extra hassle.

After being thrown off balance by that, I withdrew some cash (it was a struggle to remember the exchange rate, but my memory came through in the end - at CLP800 to the pound, approximately, I expect to improve my knowledge of large numbers in Spanish while I'm here) and fought my way through a throng of taxi drivers to try to get the bus into town. I actually found it OK, although there was a bit of confusion as there are two different buses and they share the same bus stop. Still, I got on and it cost less than two quid into the centre of town, then less than a quid for a short trip on the metro to where the hotel is.

The metro seems OK but they seem a bit short on maps. The directions of the trains are indicated, as I guess is common in most places, by the names of the end stations. This would be fine except when the only maps you can see only show the centre of the network, so you don't know what the end station is called. I managed OK, but it did piss me off.

Oh, and THERE ARE NO ESCALATORS AND THEY HAVE STEPS ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE. Not much fun with a suitcase.

I knew roughly where the hotel was relative to the metro station but naturally I got lost, I felt like an idiot/obvious victim lugging my suitcase around and it was damn hot. But I found it and it all seems OK now. I am going to go out and get something to eat, I am going to take it fairly casually tonight and not worry about finding somewhere 'good' to go, I'll just see what happens.

Oh, there is a safe in the room for valuables, but it's very small. Fortunately, my netbook *just* fits through the door, although there's a bit of a knack to it. (Once you get it inside, it will even stand on its edge at the far end, so there's plenty of space for other stuff, not that I need it.) I don't think anything normal-sized, no matter how thin it might be, would fit in there.

Final note - not doing fantastically with the language, but I do feel slightly less helpless than in Brazil. However, I keep ending conversations with "obrigado" instead of "gracias". At least it broke the ice a little bit with the 'hotel' reception staff. I guess I need a bit of time to get back into the swing of things and stop trying to use Portuguese.