The entire country of Chile has about 17 million people in it. Our hometown of Vina del Mar and its next door neighbor Valparaiso each hold a little under 300,000. In comparison, the capital city of Santiago, where we went today, houses a whopping 7 million people. This was immediately apparent as soon as we arrived. The place was packed, with people walking everywhere, clogging the streets. It really was a shock after the relatively quiet Vina. However, I actually really liked it and I think the large amount of people just added to the excitement and bustle of the city.
The first place we went to was our last company visit, The Bolsa Commercial (Stock Exchange) of Santiago. This is the biggest stock exchange in Chile and helps enable stock and derivative exchanges for most of the largest companies in the country. Though I am not very interested in business and stock trading, I did find their presentation very interesting and it helped explain some of the things that have always confused me about stocks and bonds. We also got to see the trading floor, which is practically deserted today thanks to the upgraded technology allowing individuals, corporations and brokers to simply work and trade online. Nevertheless, the room was really cool and gave me a sense of what trading stocks used to be like.
We got lunch at a fish market, which was probably one of the best meals I have ever had. And believe me, that is high praise from a guy like me. They just kept bringing us out food: clams, shrimp, calamari, scallops, fish, more fish, and even more fish. It was all so delicious and I pushed through to eat it all even though I was starting to get full. The people were really nice too and we had three guitar players serenade us for a good part of our meal.
so much fish!!!
In the afternoon we took a lift up to the top of one of Santiago's hills where we were able to get great shots of the entire city and the Andes to the west. The scene was just perfectly picturesque, I probably could have sat up there on the wall overlooking the city for hours. There was also a big statue of the Virgin Mary and a church dedicated to her honor which was kind of cool to look at. It was a really cool area and we got to spend a good amount of time wandering around and finding different views of the city. On our way back down I discovered the first water fountain I have seen here in Chile, which I found kind of exciting. We also noticed how many of the people up there with us spoke English, which was kind of weird after not having heard English conversations for the last week. We talked to some Australians who were exploring all of South America, and quite enjoyed their thick accents from down under.
After we went back down the lift, we explored a small outdoor marketplace and bought some fruit frozen yogurt, which was really good too. I am just so impressed by how good the food has been here. We then reboarded the bus to go home and this time I managed to stay awake for the whole time. Someone decided to put Mamma Mia on, and though I didn't want to watch it at all, I ended up turning up my music really loud to drown it out and then just reading the Spanish subtitles anyway. I actually got most of the gist of the movie, which at least made me happy that I am beginning to understand Spanish. Not so much happy that I technically watched Mamma Mia though... The entire day was great though, and I really loved the contrast from Vina and Valpo that we got from Santiago. As one of our guides pointed out, Vina is a great, beautiful place to live, but Santiago is the center of everything and therefore the place to be and work in Chile.
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