Mario - our dog friend

Living in the streets can't be easy. There are several issues to deal with in Santiago that make things challenging:

1. The elements - rain, cold, wind, snow (or the opposite, just not so much at this time of the year when we are all grateful for some sun in the southern hemisphere ;o))
2. The cars - Santiago is a car jungle. From an outsider's perspective, the quality of life of the Santiaginos/as would  dramatically increase if they dealt with reducing the amount of traffic in the city significantly (smog, noise, stress, commute times, asthma and other pulmonary diseases etc)
3. The others - human beings can be (but often are not) very caring. The same applies to dogs.

Home sweet home!

Today we managed it! We have a permanent place to live in! :o)

It is a beautiful house with a bit of a garden where we hope we can grow some veg, have a compost  (link in spanish) or compost (link in english), a vermicompost (spanish) or wormery (english), a couple of dogs (rescued of course, that is not even a question) and a dog poo compost too... honestly, it is not that hard and you get the picture:

Cerro Manquehue - the place of the condors

From the apartment where we currently live one can see an impressive little hill - Cerro Manquehue. It is dome shaped but with a flat top and towers above all the high rise buildings around us. It is 1635m or so in elevation, or roughly a thousand metres higher than where we are. Wikipedia says it is an extinct volcano.

Meeting the carabineros de Chile

We ended up in the back of a police van today. Seriously...