Picked up from our hotel this morning for a half day tour of Santiago. We drove around the lovely neighbourhoods with wire and electric fences. The city is quite big, about 6 million, and has hills scattered through it that are undeveloped. Poor Chile - they get constant earth tremors, the frequent enough earthquakes, they have erupting volcanoes, floods and deserts! What a challenge. They have very very poor people, and very very rich people. We saw the oldest building in all of Chile - the San Francisco church dating from the 1600s. We also went to the cathedral at the Plaza de Armas - the Santiago Metropolitan Cathedral - which was totally packed. Being Holy Thursday, the Archbishop was doing mass, school children were receiving ashes, everyone was at mass! Saint James is the patron saint of Santiago - Iago is Spanish for James (so is Diago). We saw many government buildings and were taken up a lookout. On the way back some of our group were dropped off at some markets, but I'd jarred my knee on one of the cobbled streets so we stayed on the bus with 3 others and returned to the hotel. We went to a little convenience store to stock up for tomorrow (Good Friday, everything will be closed) and then wandered down to the local Pizza Hut for a lovely lunch. They don't serve wine, only beer or soft drink! Then we returned to,our room for a rest. Our tour guide and bus driver returned to the hotel at 7.15pm to take us to a group dinner. We had a lovely time, although Tom's steak wasn't good, and Diane's dinner was sent back to be cooked further. So tomorrow is Good Friday. Everything will be closed. We have been given our rooms until 1pm. Our flight is at 11pm. The tour guide wanted to pick us up for our transfer at 8pm, but we all said no, 7pm. We'd be happier waiting at the hotel by then. Not well planned by Bunnik's. We should've been on a flight tonight!