Santiago, Chile (Friday 14 October)

I discover my iPhone clock is two hours behind. There is a 2-hour difference between Lima and Santiago and I didn’t know! All day yesterday I was two hours behind. That explains a few things!

Today was some more walking around Santiago. The Presidential Palace was impressive as you would expect. He doesn’t live here. It is just his formal city residence. The ceremonial changing of the guard happens here every second day.

Santiago is a little restless at the moment. University students are protesting against high fees. They are on strike and marching through the streets. Protest messages are all over the place.

Santiago is a mix of the very old and the new. Like Peru grand Spanish architecture dominates the city but a little less looked after. Perhaps Chilians have a lesser respect for their colonial past. Catholicism is clearly the dominating religion here with old Catholic churches everywhere. They are grand and I never tire of them despite having no spiritual interest in their existence. Some have huge cracks in their structure from recent earthquakes and I would feel more uncomfortable than usual being inside.

Many of the old buildings are wearing the stresses of earthquake damage from past years and there doesn’t seem to be any great effort to repair them. Santiago has seen a few earthquakes in recent times. The most recent was in February last year.