Seasons Greetings everyone! We hope you had a lovely Christmas, and indulged in some good food and drink!

As Richard reported we celebrated Christmas Eve with the local Couchsurfing group.  We ‘orphans’ plus locals made up 12 nationalities who mingled, ate, drank and exchanged Christmas cards on the roof top terrace of our host, Johan’s apartment. The potluck was held in the most exposed corner of the roof top terrace (on the 27^th floor of the building!) so while there was plenty of merry making we were extremely cold all night.

It was a nice night, and we really enjoyed meeting all the people from around the world and hearing what they are doing in Santiago and where they had already been in South America.  As we’re still yet to get going, we are always keen to hear of any travel stories or tips! We also haven’t seen many foreigners since we got here, so it was nice to meet other travellers. Since we moved to our new apartment we have seen a few more foreigners, but for the first ten days of our stay in Santiago we were under the impression that we were the only two foreigners in Santiago (how wrong!).

For me personally, the highlight of the night was chatting with a group of Colombians in the party next to our ‘orphan’s’ party. The Colombians party we was held in a sheltered spot from the cold and wind and they had an asado (BBQ) going.  A very friendly and welcoming group of guys, and somehow between Richard and I we managed to get along speaking our rugged as Spanish.  Chileans have an interesting way of speaking Spanish – very quickly, and dropping the second half of each word.  It makes listening and understanding them quite a mission so it is refreshing when you meet people from other countries in South America and can understand a bit more of the language.  We chatted away with the Colombians for quite a long while.  To help warm us up they shared some hard liquor from Colombia, which tasted lovely, but I did struggle a bit with Christmas day as result of it!

We took it really easy on Christmas day.  We went for a walk up Cerro Santa Lucia, an old fortress, and saw some amazing views of the city.  The smog has cleared over the last couple of days and it’s been lovely to see the mountains properly.

We also walked around Bellavista, the neighbourhood our apartment is in and took photos of the street art.  The park across the road from us was filled with families enjoying the sun, even playing in the water fountain!

Finally, we wanted to take some photos of Santiago’s street dogs.  Unfortunately it was siesta time for them as well and they were all lounging about in the sun, snoozing the afternoon away.  We really like the street dogs here.  They are friendly and while maybe a bit rough looking they are so gentle.  Making eye contact with them is dangerous as you can potentially make a friend for life!  The really cool thing also is that they know about traffic lights, and will wait until it goes green to cross the road.  Our favourite was a couple who kept watch while they crossed the road, and followed each other around.  The New Zealand Herald featured an article yesterday summing up just how awesome Chilean street dogs are, you can see it here.