Tips 4 Tours were so good yesterday that we decided to go on their other tour, 'Off Beat Santiago', to those parts of the city that might not be considered the 'Highlights'. We made our way back to Bellas Artes for the 10am start and Matias was our 'Wally' again as he promised yesterday.

A couple of quiltros, the street dogs, were hanging around waiting for us to start the tour. They are so friendly and love just a simple pat on the head.

The tour set off round the back of the museum, with the quiltros leading the way, and a Horse statue was pointed out. To us it was quite familiar, it was by the Colombian artist Botero who had a heap of statues in Medellin. The back of the Bellas Artes museum building is lots of different shades of colours because of the earthquakes (or "terremotos") suffered in Chile - it has been patched up many times. As like yesterday, we had 3 keywords to remember: terremoto, chimba and anemismo. We'll come back to them.

We left the park grounds and headed into the streets and around the first corner we were shown four different types of building architecture in one street. Again, this was due to earthquakes and the rebuilding, the new buildings being built in the architectural preference of the time.

We went on to the Central Market which is solely for seafood. The iron roof structure of the building was designed in Chile but built in Glasgow. A similar roof was built for Uruguay but there was a mix up in the shipping and they were sent to the wrong place. Santiago ended up with the one for the variable warmer temperatures and Uruguay got the other.

We crossed over the river to the La Chimba area, a much poorer neighbourhood that the rich people of Santiago wanted to be separated from (by using the river). Santiago is still very much a class orientated society where your surname, which neighbourhood you're from, your job etc matter.

There are three adjoining markets in La Chimba. Tirso de Molina market is a massive fruit and vegetable market. It was built after the 2010 earthquake to make better conditions for the street vendors.

Little Vega market adjoins Tirso de Molina and is full of butchers and restaurants. David was invited into one of the stalls for a photo while brandishing a couple of knives.

Vega Central market is a mixture of all types of produce from all over Chile and some from Peru too. Pablo Neruda, Chile's Nobel Prize winning poet, came and recited some of his poetry to the workers in the Vega market. Not only was this well appreciated in the market because not many important people would come there but Pablo also claimed it to be the best day/achievement in his life. The majority of the people had no education as such and didn't understand much of his poetry but appreciated a lot that he would actually come to see them.

The markets are huge too, across the three of them there are about 8000 stalls and daily, there will be around 10,000 people working there. One of our favorite stalls was the lady who sold "sopapilla" at the edge of the market. Sopapillas are pretty simple snack food, it's a savory deep fried dough with spicy sauce spooned over the top. Yum!! David couldn't resit a second one.

We left the market behind and headed to the Metro station for the short ride to Cementerios. As the name suggests, this was the station by the Central Cemetery of Santiago. It is huge, the size of 117 football fields, and is a cemetery for all different religions. The Catholics didn't want to be buried alongside non-Catholics so they created their own cemetery across the street.

The class society is evident even in the cemetery, poor people are buried on the right of the main road through the cemetery while the rich are buried on the left. On the 'rich' side there was some huge mausoleums whilst the poor people were buried in niches stacked on top of each other. Bizarrely, you can rent a niche for 5 years and then empty it out and hand it back. Or, if you own it outright, you can add another body into your niche after 5 years. Three bodies in one niche is quite common with the record being 12 family members interred over a 100 year period. The niches can be stacked up 7 high and there is no accurate recording of the number of people buried in the cemetery although it's estimated at between 2 and 3 million people.

One of the side streets in the cemetery is reserved for only children and this is where the 'animismo' comes in. Animismo is when a non living entity is treated as a living being. One example of this is at the grave of a baby who lived for only 5 days. The parents treat the dead child like it still alive, they come to see the grave every week, talk about what is happening in the family and have it filled with toys. On the birthday of the baby, they place party invites on the graves of the other children in the same 'street'. People will often come to cemetery and play music for, or have a drink with, their dead relatives too. Death is treated quite differently in South America compared to Britain for example.

Another curious thing about Chile's dead is making someone an 'Animita' and people will pray to them for something. If their prayer is answered then a plaque of thanks is put on the original grave. It's similar to people praying to Saints but animitas are not religious, they are usually young and die tragically. We were shown the grave of young disabled boy who sold candy at the central station, he was killed 70 years ago in a violent robbery. People now come to his grave to ask for favors that they can not ask from God. Many wishes have obviously come true because there are loads of plaques thanking him.

Salvador Allende has his family tomb in the cemetery. One of the other ex-presidents who didn't die of natural causes either, gets lots of requests from students to help them pass exams etc. Students used to write on the tomb but after requests from the family not to, they now throw notes through the bars of the tomb.

We left the cemetery and went to a bar across the road to try a Terremoto drink, made with grenadine, wine and topped with pineapple ice cream. It's not as bad as it sounds but we have it from the guide that after two, you will have an earthquake going off in your head.

After finishing our drink, we said goodbye to Matias and hopped back on the metro to Quinta Normal to visit the Museum of Human Rights, which was free to enter. It was very interesting with pictures, videos, visuals and histories of people from the time of Pinochet dictatorship.

We walked back through the Brasil neighbourhood which wasn't particularly special so we didn't even stop at any of the bars. We continued on to the supermarket and picked up ingredients for a homemade pizza.

While David cooked, Maria sorted out accommodation in Mendoza where we will travel to tomorrow.

Once again we had a nice sunset over the city while we ate our dinner.