Monday 16/04
Wake up quite late this morning: 9am.
Good breakfast and then a special kind of homeschooling this morning: Isabelle asks the kids to prepare a presentation about Machu Picchu. It’s a great idea. Each kid has to focus on one aspect: Jules the construction, Ludivine the history and Florence the lifestyle of the Incas.
I continue preparing the Peru.
We eat our usual salad for lunch.
We chill a bit after lunch. We can feel that the whole family needs to relax after the quite intense last weeks. We hadn’t really rest in a location since Queenstown, one month ago…
Around 5pm we go out. I go and take some cash with Jules and we then go and order sushis for tonight. We are celebrating our 9th month of travel today. Four more months! Isabelle goes with the girls to buy jeans for Florence at H&M. We meet at 6:15pm at the Hoyts movie theatre. I indeed go with the kids to see the new Spielberg, ‘Ready Player One’. We all loved this movie. It’s great; it’s of course an action movie but Spielberg always manages to put emotions in his movies.
We come back home after 10pm, after taking away our sushis order at ‘Duri Sushi’.
Isabelle already set the table (after her short yoga session), with avocadoes and carrots and also a bottle of sparkling wine. She likes Chilean wines. We enjoy this “orgy” of sushis.
We go and sleep early.
Tuesday 17/04
We wake up around 8:30am. Ludivine, who is a bit sick, is sleeping later today.
After breakfast, kids do homeschooling.
This Airbnb is convenient but it’s not great; it’s definitely not one of the best ones we’ve got. The most “important” things for us in an Airbnb are the bed (mainly its width…), the shower and the coziness of the place where we spend most of our time (i.e. living room and dining room, which is often one room); the cherry on the cake being a dishes machine. Based on these criteria, this Airbnb is average only.
Around 1:30pm, we go and visit Las Condes district, the “international face of Chile’s economic growth”. The contrast with our district (Santiago Centro) is striking in all aspects: glittering skyscrapers, business people in the streets, security-heavy apartment blocks, posh eateries… We take the metro. We go and eat at ‘Poke Bar’. It’s a nice place; we eat on the terrace. The bowls are good. They also have a granola bar, which is a good idea for breakfast and for dessert. Each time we go to a Poké place, we all enjoy and we also find new ideas for maybe a future project; let’s see…
We go and visit the shopping mall of the Costanera Center, at the bottom of the Gran Torre Santiago, the tallest building in South America (300m). We stay less than 2 hours and we don’t buy anything (except a selfie stick for Ludivine, at Miniso, one of Ludivine’s favorite shops. We eat a frozen yoghurt (and Isabelle takes a juice from Boost). Then we go to a park with statues. We then walk to the W hotel, to see the chic lobby. We also stop at the Pain Quotidien to buy a bread.
We take the metro to go back to our apartment. It’s rush hours; we can’t take the same metro together. The girls and I have to wait 4 metros before being able to go into a train…
I go to the nearby supermarket to buy some groceries but I give up in view of the very long queues.
I prepare dinner for the kids (few sushis of yesterday + avocados + carrots…).
Isabelle and I go to eat at Peumayen. I could get a table at 10pm. It’s one of the most unique culinary experiences in Chile. The restaurant delivers innovating Chilean cuisine by looking back to the culinary roots of the Mapuche, Easter Islanders and Quechua. We take the tasting menu, served on a stone slab and featuring modern takes on traditional indigenous fare like llama, lamb tongue, sweet breads, (very tasty) horse meat… We don’t like everything but we like the overall exploration of Chile’s gastronomic roots.
We come back at midnight.
