I intended to get this blog up and running with some of my other (BC local) adventures from July but time ran out and here I am — finally — in the southern continent of the Americas.
What hit me first? ‘Fuck, I really should have put more effort into learning Spanish!’
Santiago feels more ‘Spanish’ (linguistically) than any major city I’ve been to in Spain. Not only is the Spanish different from Spain, English and other languages are way less common to be heard on the streets or spoken by a random stranger or merchant.
Which feeds into my main (failed) task today — find a Chilean SIM card. What I thought would be an easy task turned into a full afternoon scouring five (yes 5!) floors of a mega-mall trying to find pay-as-you go (prepago) SIM cards with my broken Spanish dragging me down every step of the way.
A brief aside, this mall put Metrotown to shame! I had no idea Santiago was a mall mecca as this was just one of several large malls in the city. I must admit I was impressed that it had a North Face, Mammut, and Mountain Hardware store in the same mall. Vancouver doesn’t even have two of those three (dedicated) stores in the whole city!
Office buildings with a 5 story mall + ciniplex on the 6th floor. Metrotown eat that.
Anyways, the SIM card. I found one, a Virgin Mobile one, and thought I had hit the jackpot, but it didn’t work. Voice, but no data. For some reason I can’t enter an APN, my phone rejects it. The attempts at calling the help line (Chilean Spanish) and finding someone who spoke English failed. I will try again tomorrow. Sigh.
All is not lost though, I found a nice restaurant for dinner in the vicinity of my hotel. A restaurant called Pinpilinpausha that served Basque style food. I had a tasty civiche appy and a fish stuffed with shrimp for the main course. It seemed that the wine was only available in bottles so I downed a bottle of wine to myself (hic). I didn’t know Chilean Pinot Noir was a thing, but apparently it is and it wasn’t half bad either. Pretty damned alcoholic for a pinot at 14.5% (much higher than usual) but that didn’t seem to throw it off too much. An espresso was necessary to keep me walking.
Forget the food, this is the important stuff.
So, what’s up next? I’m not quite sure. I have to figure out a plan. The options are to stick around here a bit longer and ski the areas north/east of Santiago (La Parva/El Colorado/Valle Nevado, or Portilla) or start heading south right away to ski Nevados de Chillan and/or Villarrica (Pucon), The southern areas are currently much colder and have been dumped with snow lately, while the northern areas near Santiago have been a lot warmer and drier but are also much higher (close to 4000m) with more technical terrain. Hmmm.
On a complete side note, I was checking up on the blog of the best QA lead ever (Elliot Rushton) and his brother and my long ago high school classmate (Tom Rushton) on their Rockies ultra-marathon adventure. Pretty insane, check it out here. Best wishes to them.
Everyone in Berlin speaks English; most speak it well. I’m rocking a O2 sim card. w00t. Took 5 mins.