RatSoap

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Easter Island!

No, we have not gone to Easter Island. The photo above is of a restaurant on a street nearby. It looks like a nice restaurant, so I hope we can go there on my birthday.

Easter Island is part of Chile, but is as far from Santiago as Hawaii is from California. It's a long flight and an expensive trip, so we probably won't get to go there.

If you want to learn more about Easter Island, click here. And to see some nice photos of Easter Island, click here.

To buy our school supplies, we went to a store called Jumbo. It is as large as a Wal-Mart, and has pretty much the same things. Mom even found chocolate chips there. This Jumbo had seventy cash registers!

We bought most of the supplies we needed. The list the school gave us was long and very particular about exactly what type of notebooks we needed---what color, how many pages, what size, what kind of lines, etc. For example, some classes require graph paper with squares that are exactly five millimeters long, while others want squares that are exactly seven millimeters long.

All of our school supplies at the Jumbo (except for the textbooks) cost more than one hundred dollars! And we still need to buy the textbooks and uniforms.

We usually go for walks in the late afternoon to different neighborhoods, and always come across a few parks. RJE likes to go down the slide before we keep walking. On one of our walks, we crossed a street called Callao.

It isn't named after Callao, Virginia, though. Dad says that Callao is actually a huge port on the coast of Peru. In Spanish, it's pronounced Kah-jah-o. I looked it up and found this information.

Saturday was the first day of a new bus system in Santiago called Transantiago. It has been in the news for months. They changed the bus routes AND the bus numbers, so everything seemed very confusing in the first few days of the new system. Most buses were full, and people were standing on the road and pushing to try to get on them. This is what it looked like from our apartment:

There were so many angry people waiting to get on the buses that TV reporters arrived with cameras to interview them.

Because of the confusion, the government said that the buses would not charge anything until things went back to normal. So we took a FREE bus to a park in downtown called Quinta Normal, and the bus was so stuffed with passengers and people selling ice cream, selling water AND selling screwdrivers, that we could barely breathe! But things are getting better now.

Quinta Normal is a large park with several museums in it. We started with the train museum.

It has many old trains made in Germany and America, and a couple made in Chile.

We got to go on one of them, too. It just had seats.

There was also a station that had a miniature train going around a track, but it wasn't as big as the one at the Reedville Fishermen's Museum.

After walking around the pond at Quinta Normal...

...we visited the Museum of Natural History. It was too big and they had too many things, but we liked the stuffed animals and the large collection of insects.

On the way home, Mom spotted a little girl at the bus stop---the SAME girl who had ridden with us on the bus from Villarrica to Santiago back in January! She even recognized us. Dad said it was an incredible coincidence, since Santiago is a city of more than five million people, and the chances of running into a stranger twice are very few.

Anna Karenina #10

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