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I left a cold and gray but delightful Paris and headed for Santiago, Chile - another 12 hour overnight flight, this time on Air France. I guess it's no surprise that they win the prize for best food so, with a modest amount of sleep it was really no problem. Perhaps it's worth mentioning that jet lag was never a problem on this trip. I have generally found that traveling east to west is much easier for me to avoid jet lag and that certainly was confirmed on this trip.

When morning came we were over the Andes so I can't resist a couple of airplane window snapshots. I later found out that there is a bus route from Argentina to Chile over the Andes that sounds like an awesome experience - next time?

I disembarked and grabbed a shuttle bus to the hotel. After a quiet afternoon at the hotel sitting on the deck, sipping mojitos and blogging, I had a light dinner and hit the sack. By the way, the hotel was the Hyatt Place Vitacura and it was an extremely nice stay with an exceptionally helpful and friendly staff. A bit of a break from Airbnb's and well worth it.

So what to do first? I know! Let's go to a hands-on science museum! I hit the subway system and zoomed out to MIM, the Museo Interactivo Mirador. It's a nice modern building with an attractively laid out interior.

Each bay contains a related set of exhibits, and each had a volunteer explainer standing by. There were some maintenance issues with the exhibits, which is of course not uncommon, but overall it was quite well done. One exhibit was kind of unique- devoted to copper and copper mining. It had nice displays of different uses for copper and of different methods of ore refining. It also had an exhibit where kids could see themselves in the equipment used by various workers in the mines and refineries; a little bit of recruiting, I guess.

One cool thing that appealed to me was their exhibit shop, just outside the museum proper.

I seems to me that this would be an absolutely ideal place to install an Innovation5-style fablab for the surrounding community!

I walked around the neighborhood of the museum quite a bit to get a feel for the area. My overall impression was of modest and well-maintained single family homes. I did glimpse pockets of poverty in Santiago but I will say that in general the people seemed in good spirits. I also had the feeling of greater warmth of interactions between people wherever I went, including families with children, young couples and just regular folks. I would go so far as to say that I felt that the Chilean people were the most content population I saw on the trip. There are some very nice parks and perhaps surprisingly some very good and well-populated bicycle trails. They have had some tough times both politically and economically, but the economy is apparently recovering and people seem to be getting on with their lives pretty well.

I decided to go for a traditional Chilean meal and picked a place nearby called Chilenazo where I ordered a traditional Chilean barbeque specialty, the parrillada, cooked by this guy.

It looks big, but it is in fact much bigger (this is the half portion, by the way). Imagine being served a delicious skirt steak that would be a full meal in any US restaurant along with a blood sausage. You wolf it down and the server brings a delicious flank steak of similar size and a nice big pork sausage. You work through that and then its an amazingly tender pork chop and a serving of barbequed tripe. Now in a state of total torpor and meat saturation you are served two more relatively small (waafer thin?) pork sausages. Oh and did I mention the potatoes? I failed completely, by the way.

I only had a couple of days in Santiago and I wandered around downtown for a while. Their central market is quite cool with lots of fruit and flowers. I also ran across this bridge which had a couple of interesting features. First, of course, are all the padlocks. I had seen this in Paris as well but apparently it's a worldwide thing - love locks. Couples write their names (or sometimes a wish) on a padlock and lock it to the bridge. It's becoming a bit of a problem in some places where the weight of the locks actually are damaging the bridges. The second interesting thing is the water. It's hard to tell from this photo, but that water is extremely muddy and moving extremely fast - Andean melt water which is carrying huge amounts of sediment even in mid summer.

I really liked Santiago - from the great weather (upper 70's) moderated by their altitude, the surrounding Andes that poke up wherever you look, the decent infrastructure and people it is a pleasure to be around it's an extremely appealing part of the world.

Next, I'm off to Valparaiso a coastal city that has always intrigued me - and my final stop on this adventure!