SoCal Family Time!

Hello! It has been a long time, my apologies! Let's get started! I left off with my leaving Santiago to head back to Buenos Aires.

I spent my week in BA enjoying the sights, sounds and food of the city. Even better the second time around!

Upon the end of my time in South America I headed to LA on a stop over on my way to Tokyo.

In LA, "the fam" (Mom, Dad, Aunt Judy and Uncle Len) came out to the West Coast to meet up with me. My uncle Len's brother and sister-in-law very generously opened their beautiful Huntington Beach to us all. It was fantastic!

Between relaxation and delicious dinners we ran around SoCal doing errands and chasing down a Chinese visa. A big shout of to my Mom and Dad for shuttling me around LA! (I am writing this post from China, I made it!) We also had a chance to do a city bus tour of LA while waiting for the visa in question. Pics below. More to come!

The 90210

Huntington Beach

Rodeo Drive

Chateau Marmont

Sunset Blvd

Add caption

Santiago and Valparaiso, Chile

Much to my surprise Santiago is like NYC with mountains. It is big and expensive and there are Dunkin' Donuts on the street corners! Weird! 

After a couple days in Santiago I decided I really needed to go back to Buenos Aires. In the same way Santiago is like NYC, Buenos Aires is like a cool, fashionable European city.  I can go to NYC anytime, I needed more delicious coffee (sorry Dunkin'), croissants (not really per my growing gut, but really) and heaping platters of grilled meat! So off I went to Buenos Aires but not before vising another winery (this is what I am here for after all) and Valparaiso, a beautiful port city.

On the wine tour I found a new buddy, George, a 70 year old guy from Seattle who was in town with his wife who was attending a conference. Small world! The next day I was happy to find him again on the Valparaiso tour, it was nice to talk about Seattle and how lucky we are to live in such a beautiful place while visiting beautiful places. 

A note: I wasn't really aware how much I like graffiti but I really like graffiti hence all the pictures of graffiti. Enjoy!

Kitties! Sleeping! So cute!

Crossing the border - The Andes Mountains

It is off to Santiago de Chile I go! Argentina is amazing, I love it, stole my heart! Who would have guessed!? (joke, it was almost a guarantee) 

Crossing the border from Argentina to Chile involves going over a crazy high mountain pass in the Andes Mountains.  This turns out to be a very long as well as hair-raising experience. I set out on the 9 am bus with an expected arrival of 4 pm (7 hours) which quickly turned into a 10 hour trip when we encountered an delay due to an accident on the 1 lane road over the pass. oh well!

The border crossing was pretty smooth by Latin American standards and then began the hair-raising. While efficiency in border crossing processes might not be Chilean strong suit building some serious mountain roads are! We spent at least an hour traversing some serious switchbacks on our way down the back side of  a mountain into Chile. There were a couple times I started to panic a teeny tiny bit as I am pretty sure we had a front wheel over the edge of the cliff! Sure enough though safe and sound into the city of Santiago!

More to come from my new home for the next two weeks: Santiago, Chile. After that I will be saying goodbye to Latin America, a brief hello to family in LA and then off to the other side of the world: Tokyo! 

Yikes! 

Mendoza - wine, olives and meat!

Because this is Mendoza the obvious first thing I do is get on a wine tour! We visited 2 wineries, neither so fantastic but who really cares!? What was seriously delicious and interesting was an olive oil factory we stopped at where we sampled some olive oils processed on-site using traditional methods. Yum! 

When I arrived back at Little Tibet Karma had prepared an amazing Argentine "parrilla" or grill with meat galore! It was absolutely heavenly, I could eat that every day!

My time in the beautiful city of Mendoza is short, next stop Chile!!!