Salvador Allende’s last words before being killed in the Palacio de la Moneda still manage to give me chills. Santiago de Chile’s downtown exudes history, but it is also terribly polluted and overly americanized. As I walked around the Plaza de Armas, Catedral, Cerro Santa Lucia and Mercado Central,and saw all these stressed people, I couldn’t but feel nostalgia of Buenos Aires.

There are two men that were my main reasons to want to come to Santiago; one was Allende, the other one the poet Pablo Neruda. The guided visit to its museum-home La Chascona, is totally worth it (as it probably is his Valparaiso home La Sebastiana). Another highlight of my trip to Santiago was the bus ride from Bariloche via Osorno, in the middle of a snow storm…