Virgin above the Zoo

Our entire trip has been floating between extremes. Coffee farm, then big dirty city. Machu Picchu, then island hopping on a lake. So, since we just saw wild flamingos in Bolivia, why not go see them at the zoo in Santiago? I can imagine people thinking “Why would you want to go to the zoo? A zoo is a zoo.” Well, that’s true. But, we hadn’t seen the zoo in Santiago! Besides, the zoo was situated on the side of the mountain which we wanted to climb, anyway. Kinda weird and interesting. Also, we have an obsession with photographing animals. So, we went to the zoo.

Yep, it was a zoo…just like at home. But, as I mentioned before, it was on the side of the mountain so we got some good views of the city. Also, the animals were very friendly and photogenic. Some animals posed for us.

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Some had great views behind them…

Some wanted to get up close and personal…

When we had seen all of the animals, we had made it further up the mountain. At the end (or top) of the zoo was an entrance to the mid-point of the Teleferico or cable car. We jumped on and rode it to the top to visit The Virgin and get our typical panoramic city view.

Afterward, we went back down the cable car and headed home. On the way we stopped by a movie theater where we saw El Cisne Negro was playing. Since we had just seen black swans at the zoo, we now knew what that translated to. Besides, it had Natalie Portman in it. How bad could it be? It’s amazing how different movies are when you haven’t seen the previews 80 times and have no idea what it’s about. We give El Cisne Negro an “ummmm, okayyyy” review.

That about sums up our Santiago visit. Lots of normalness such as movies, the zoo and of course TONS of Starbucks visits. Time for a different extreme, which was scheduled to be the beaches of Valparaiso. The morning of our departure, we both admitted to each other that we were really more interested in getting beach week over with (can you imagine!?) so we could move on to wine country. So we did. Valpo was out, Mendoza was in! Off we went in the opposite direction to our sixth country, Argentina!