Chilean Central Coast: San Antonio y Cartagena

This is way delayed...from over a month ago...on Halloween. But I'm waiting for Liz Seward (UC Irvine) to have our weekly Mmm-mmm-Monday date, only this week it's on Thursday. Our Mmm-mmm-Monday is a food date where we try a new restaurant every week. Anyway, Halloween is Evangelical Day in Chile, which just became a holiday a year ago so we had school off. I wanted to get to know Chile more so Richard, Andrew, and I took a trip to the Central Coast, which is just 2 hours away. We went on and off buses trying to hit up all the small towns that dot the Central Coast.

I was hoping for a beautiful sunny day day, but it turned out to be grey and cold. I only brought a thin jacket, and I was really cold. I also didn't want to buy a new jacket for $20. Solution? Found a used clothing store and picked up this stylish sweater for $1.20 that probably hasn't been washed in 5 years. Looks good, no? Above is the woman who sold it to me. I quickly donated it when I got back home, haha.

First stop: San Antonio! An industrial port town that isn't too easy on the eyes.

But it has big pelicans walking around.

But you can see, not too pretty.

A huuuuuge walrus we saw right next to the pier! It was so fat and big it looked almost mechanical. A cat tried getting close to it, and it got annoyed so it ROARED at the cat, scaring it away. Such a funny sight!

My guide book told me about a 'caleta,' whatever that is.

Working our way down to the caleta.

With my ugly sweater.

So it's like a cliff?

Andriuuu was brave enough to climb the rocks and pose as a merman.

A seafood empanada. Mmm. Since I was along the coast the entire time, seafood is quite abundant (and cheap!). I want to go back there again before I leave Chile to eat some good seafood.

My lunch. Pastel de jaivas...it was watery and not very good at Manzana restaurant in Cartagena. Bleh. I only enjoyed it because Andrew gave me all his seafood to mix it in.

We then went to a laguna in Cartagena. Here is Andrew posing with an ugly face...that's what I get for being his official Chile photographer.

The welcome sign on the laguna. I took a picture of it because there's funnily written Japanese on it.

And we ended the day visitng El Monte! There was an Evangelical Day concert thing going on. I mainly went back to El Monte to visit Pedro and Teresa though. I felt so bad ebcause I called them like 3 times flip flopping about whether I'd be there or not. It was so nice to see them again and buy more alfajores from them :0)