The Hollando Diet

Ok, so a slight misquote in the above. Liz and I arrived in sunny Santiago, Chile on Saturday morning, and have spent the last few days exploring the city before departing across the ocean again for Easter Island. So I have the pleasure of writing this entry in a (fairly smoky) hotel bar at the San Cristobal Tower Hotel, with the Red Sox-Yankees debacle on screen in the background. But enough about that. Next year is going to be just great.

The great thing about this kind of vacation is the walking - you really do get a lot of exercise, and we’ve climbed quite a few hills and paced much of the downtown area over the last few days. Today was probably the lightest of the bunch, since we took a bus to the outskirts of town and toured one of the local (although also, apparently, multinational) wineries, the Concha del Toro. Whose products are available at every local supermarket in England, at least, for approximately $8 a bottle. So nothing special there, but the drive out was fun and the tour was charming.

Chile is less expensive than the US, although more so than other South American and Asian countries that I’ve visited. Prices in nice hotels are the same everywhere, and that’s helped me eat fairly well. It also helps that this is an exploration trip rather than an eating-and-drinking trip, so we haven’t been hitting overly elaborate restaurants. There’s no real Chilean cuisine, anyway, although we did have some nice empanadas at the top of one of the hills overlooking the city. US restaurants have accustomed me to a certain empanada size, so I accidentally ordered us enough to feed a family of four.

There’s a scale in the hotel, so once I’ve worked out the kilogram to pound conversion (I’ve got it somewhere) I’ll see where I’ve gotten to. I spent three weeks in the UK shortly before leaving on this trip, and was pleasantly surprised to see that I was still hovering around 169 when I got back, even though I’d been living in a hotel. Exchange rates managed to keep my food impulses in check. That slid up a pound or two when I got back to Cambridge, but that expected.

More to come, including some actual travelogue.