I've taken it quite easy today, as my stomach is angry with me for some reason (it can't be all the avocadoes surely?) plus it's raining anyway.

Yesterday evening I went to Marco Polo again, this time to have the lasagna. I got this huge mountain of pasta and meat which I could barely finish. Waiter Ricardo asked if I remembered his name from yesterday, which I did, even though he didn't remember mine!

Afterwards, I bought a ticket for La Vuelta al Mundo en Ochenta Días (see if you can work that one out), hoping it would be in English, but of course Jackie Chan and Steve Coogan spoke fluent Spanish all of a sudden... Well, I suppose it's good for my Spanish and I'd seen it before anyway.

At breakfast this morning, Señora Myriam got me coffee instead of tea, yuk. They have this really cute Golden Retriever puppy which found my white socks very interesting and started chewing them. Unfortunately my feet were in it. It then transferred its affections to my sandals and started licking them. Well, to each his own I suppose.

I went out about 11.30 and walked to the Plaza Sotomayor. I tried to get that bus that allegedly goes up into the hills and then all the way to Viña del Mar, but I gave up after fifteen minutes and fifty buses went by. I took shelter from the rain and started talking to Luis, who works in the harbour. He complimented me on my Spanish but as we just covered the standard topics (where are you from, how long have you been in Chile) I have the standard answers to that pretty much memorised...

I went to the Merval, which is the metro linking Valpo and Viña. Waiting for the train was an older man with cute, squinting little eyes and a cap. He was a teacher living in Viña and he helped me to orientate myself.

Viña del Mar is a beach resort. Beach resorts out of season (it's spring here) are always a bit sad, especially on a rainy day like today, but Viña is pretty bad. Even on a nice day, it would be hard to ignore that there are loads of ugly high rise buildings towering over what little beach there is and that there is loads of traffic.

I walked to the sea, which smelt salty and fishy. The centre plazas are nice and green, but the centre of the city is pretty much a building site. It was pretty bleak and I decided to take a minibus back to Valpo, which is slightly nicer than the metro as it does not go through the ugliest parts of town.

When I got back, it had started raining again pretty badly, so I listened to my cd's and pretended I was at Playa Ancón in Trinidad, getting sunburnt. Which was a feat of the imagination as I was wearing long trousers and my fleece jacket and I was very cold...

I went out to Vitamin Service for some vitamins, in the form of a lovely sandwich and a papaya fruit juice. (Chileans just call it papaya but in other parts of the world it's know as fruta bomba as papaya is also a slang term for vagina. Just so you know.) My stomach is still not totally happy though.

When I got home, I was absolutely soaked through. I am so going to regret not buying those waterproof trousers...