Sunday 10th January

Lazy morning packing my stuff, wrestling with the hotel WiFi, which works fine on my phone but not on the laptop, and trying to organise myself before checking out of the Mercure and taking the metro a couple of stops and walking to Avenida Rangagua where I shall be staying with D&K for the next week. This is a home stay arranged by the Bellavista Spanish school. D&K are a older couple who have an apartment on the second (Chilean) floor of a fairly old building. 

The rather Grey Apartment Block

Pretty Terraced Houses Nearby

They are extremely welcoming but don’t speak much English; well I am supposed to be learning Spanish. Their home looks very traditional with hardly a square metre of flat surface that isn’t covered by some decoration or memento. Much like Pablo Naruda’s house but on a less grandiose scale. I have a small, simply furnished, room with it’s own toilet and shower. D explains that if I want a hot shower I need to use another bathroom. I am the third student; there is a middle aged Frenchman, R, sporting an old fashioned waxed moustache and a Korean student, who I only met briefly, whose name I think is Kim. (Aren’t almost all Koreans called Kim?) After settling in and establishing that the WiFi works perfectly, I set out for the city centre to find it surprisingly lively for a Sunday afternoon, with many of the shops open. 

Found myself at the impressive but empty Mapoche station built in early 20^th century in the heyday of rail travel and it served the line to Valparaiso, my planned next port of call, until the 1980s when it was closed and the train service terminated. It is now a cultural centre but it looked like a big, open, empty space to me.

Mapoche Station

Mapoche Station: a Big Empty Space 

Headed back to Lastaria in the expectation that if I got there fairly early on a Sunday evening I would have a choice of restaurants to eat in, but the area was packed solid. Eventually found “Culto” up a side street where I had a huge sandwich and a glass of wine. Stopped off for a desert and another glass of wine on the way back to my new lodgings.

Culto: Not much of a Guard Dog; Everyone steps over him.