Santiago, Day 2

Unfortunately, the meeting I had scheduled for today with my Santiago collaborator was canceled because of illness (his, not mine). A stomach bug, so miserable, but not serious. Santiago is just 90 mins from where we're living in Vina del Mar, so I'll come back next week sometime to meet him in person.

With a free day, we Uber'd to a different part of downtown today and just walked around. At one point, we ended up in a giant mall food court that had a Papa John's. Out of curiosity, we had pizza for lunch. It didn't taste like Papa John's in the US, but it was good.

It's remarkable how healthy the large indoor shopping malls are here. We went through a couple of sprawling, multi-story malls. Both were busy at mid-day on a Tuesday. No empty storefronts. I guess Amazon hasn't gutted the malls here in Chile... yet. Or, maybe these malls happen to be Amazon-proof as some are in the US.

We walked quite a bit through residential areas and commercial areas. There's a lot of public green space and we walked through some of that. Like this sculpture garden

 The Mapocho River runs through the heart of downtown. While I have no point of comparison, based on the flow and muddiness, it looks like it's in its spring runoff phase.

Tomorrow, we go to our home base for the next 6 months. I think we're both ready to not be living out of suitcases and to start getting to know our new home.