After staking our claim to our room (putting our bags down and locking the door behind us) we walked up to the top of Virgen Cumbre, a little peak that juts up a thousand+ feet over Santiago with a big, white statue of the Virgin Mary on top. The views were spectacular both in the distance and in the forefront. The city sprawled out below us until it reaches the mountains where it abruptly stops because it just can't go any farther. The mountains jet up thousands of feet practically out of no where, quite the panorama if I do say so myself. However, like I said, amazing things were happening in the forefront as well. What immediately comes to mind was the dog that we saw, i think the proper term would be air humping directly above another dog (not making contact) that was trying to take a nap and succeeding as far as I could tell. The thing that really topped it off for me was that this was all taking place in the sanctuary of immaculate conception. I believe the dog knew that it would be wrong to actually hump in that place so he just air humped. Really an intelligent and holy creature.
Enough about that, we came down from the cumbre (summit) to get a bite to eat and then take a nap. Post nap we went a block down the street to get a bottle of wine and then returned to the hostel to make friends. We met some good people, a couple guys traveling from St. Louis, a couple guys from San Fran down on a snowboarding trip (still looking forward to hearing from those guys tonight about the epic rides which i'm sure they had because the mountains have just been seriously dumped on, awesome!), and best of all a group of five irish girls (age 27 give or take) who we went our for drinks with and just had an absolute blast. These girls speak practically no spanish and an english which can be hard to understand at times, and they have been traveling around south america for 4 months now and doing it well from the stories they told. Seriously impressive to see these girls laughing and joking and haggling their way through la bellavista with hardly any spanish under their belt. Needless to say, quite the enjoyable evening.
That is pretty much all that has happened up til now in my aventuras in south america. Its shaping up to be quite the experience. I already feel like I've been here a week and it has only been a funfilled 24 hours. Much love to all (probably just Miles for now, but love ya homie) and I hope you are all having a good time doing whatever it is that you are doing. Hasta el proximo vez, Peace!
