The hostel we were staying at was great - Dominica Hostel...highly recommend! That being said, it was adjacent to the main party street in Santiago...which meant many mannyyy days/night of meeting new people and going for drinks. Probably too many drinks.
Since none of this was particularly memorable, we'll just share a few highlights. The first awesome thing, was meeting Jan, Michael and Josh. Our only activity we did together was walk up to a fancy swimming pool where we had to pay way too much money to swim around (but it had a pretty cool view of Santiago). The rest of the time with these guys was spent at The Purple Place. The Purple Place is a bar on the party street - I won't think we ever did find out the real name of it, but we ended up there almost every night. I think it was on night 3 of drinking there that we realized it didn't even have a roof and was actually just a cloth sheet over our heads at the plastic tables. Oh, man it was fun there. Good times. Josh and Michael had plans every day to move on to a new city and explore as it was there first week in South America, but they were always way too hungover to get goin'. On one memorable day, we found ourselves in an Irish pub in Santiago with these American kids from Charlotte watching the Carolina Panthers NFL game. Go Panthers Go! Their love for Cam Newton was infectious. Eventually they moved on, and it was probably a good thing for all involved. The other awesome thing about Dominica was the owner - Johan. He was a great guy! We thought for the longest time that he was just the manager, but one day we convinced him to go for drinks with us and that changed everything. At first we suggested we grab a six pack from the store and bring it back to the hostel for us to share, but no no...Jo wants to treat us to a beer on the terrace. Okay, why not? We get there and before you know if we've consumed 6 litres of beer between us. At the end, we didn't pay a thing! Turns out that Jo owns that bar...and co-owns 2 other bars, and the hostel. Oh and he was an american diplomat working at embassies all over the world and has met many presidents. He's now 46 years old, running an awesome hostel, and drinking beers with people from around the world. Not a bad life. We continued drinking with him and he showed us one of his favorite dinner places and showed us the proper things that the locals drink. Again, this lead to a hangover the following day...no surprise there. Par for the course.
All in all, Santiago was a great time! Definitely time for a break. Guess that means we should go to Vegas, right?
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