Too much walking

This morning we did an excellent walking tour of Santiago, which gave a really good overview of the city and its history, then James and I settled into an Irish pub (yes, Irish) to watch the Spain-Portugal game, where I enjoyed my first Pisco Sour, which was really nice and strong... so strong I had a bit of a nap near the end of the second half, but managed to recover to see Spain finish one-up and go through to the next round.

Next was the funicular up the San Christobal hill, where unfortunately the grand vista of the city was pretty much covered in smog - we could still make out the mountains, not that it really matters since we'll be going over them ourselves soon enough!

Unfortunately I was overruled about buying a return trip down the hill, and we ended up walking... 7.2km back the long way down the vehicle road. As I had suspected, the more direct pedestrian route was completely unsafe to use near sundown, in fact security guards were posted along the entrances to deter dumb tourists from going down, which is probably quite a good idea.

After a dinner of traditional Chilean comfort food/home-style cooking, we took the metro back to our hostel - the metro system here is noticeably cleaner and more modern than Buenos Aires, but still not as good as Hong Kong. =)

Tomorrow we're off to Valparaiso, hopefully can fit in a visit to one of Pablo Neruda's houses there too!

Two tours and our first celeb sighting!

After dropping our laundry off at a place around the block, we made our way to Rockefeller Plaza where we did the Radio City Music Hall and NBC Studio tours back-t0-back. We had a pretty good guide and a relatively small group of eight for the Radio City one so it was pretty good, the Art Deco interiors and design were cool, and we even got to go on the stage and meet a 'Rockette', one of two hundred dancing girls who perform regularly there (and around the country), though the one we met seemed almost... robotic in the way she recited her spiel and then offered to take photos with us.

The NBC tour was by contrast extremely packed, there were quite a few school groups going through and the pages doing the guiding were obviously quite numb to the constant flow of visitors. We got taken to Brian William's news studio, the Football in America studio, and finally the Saturday Night Live studio. The highlight of the tour though was definitely being given a chance to see Jimmy Fallon rehearse his jokes for tonight's Late Night show! We even got to talk to him 'directly' because he asked if there were any visitors from outside America, when James said 'New Zild' he responded 'England?', then I had to correct him by loudly enounciating 'New ZEEland'. Anyway, he had quite a few jokes mostly revolving around the Iran election, LA Lakers, etc. Most of them were good, except for one that nobody laughed at, and then we all laughed because nobody laughed... We'll be sure to catch tonight's show to see what made the cut!