Riding through Parque Forestal, a visit to Los Condes, and some unfinished business

     I went through the rest of the video from yesterday's bike ride and decided one more file is worth uploading.  It is a bike ride through Parque Forestal that starts from Plaza Italia and goes toward Museo de Bellas Artes.  (Click here to see the YouTube video).

     Today we rode the red line to the end of the line in Los Condes.  Erin heard of a neat market there from some of her Spanish student friends.  The market was called Centro Artesanal Los Dominicos, and we scored a few last minute items.  There are many little interconnected shops - perhaps 100 of them.  It is a nice setting with the trees and just the neat way it is set up.

     One of the shops was full of stringed instruments that a guy was busy making.  One was a 20 stringer kind of like a guitar.

     One piece of unfinished business is the whole running thing.  October has pretty much been a wash as I pulled both hamstrings.  The past two weeks I've been busy doing stretching, ice, and compression with things sort of like ACE bandages.  I went for a 2 mile run on Wednesday, running only about 8 or 9 minute miles.  It felt pretty good, so I ran 3 miles on Thursday - also feeling pretty good.  Friday was the bike ride, so I thought I'd give it a shot to do my 5 miler up Cerro San Cristobal on Saturday.  It was really quite good for about 2 miles, nearly all of which is uphill (the "bottom half" video from yesterday's blog post).  Just as I was getting ready to crest the hill my left hamstring started twitching and I knew was it meant.  I stopped and did a little bit of easy stretching and then ran down the other side of the hill at about a 9 minute pace.  At the bottom I did some more easy stretching and then ran on home.  The run up felt great - down was more of a trying not to hurt myself again type of scenario, which is a bit hard mentally, but at least I got the run in.  Since it is 48 hours until departure, I decided to throw the running shoes in the wash so 1) they are fresh for packing for the trip home, and 2) so that I don't try to run again before leaving.  I don't want my last run in Santiago to be a walk home. Speaking of departure, the word from home today was that it snowed for a bit.

     That leaves one other piece of unfinished business.  It is a follow up from one of my earliest posts regarding an Ass Gigante.  I mentioned in that post that I didn't know what one tasted like, and JKL found that to be quite amusing.  Therefore, today I set out on a quest to find out what an Ass Gigante tastes like.  First of all, an Ass comes in two sizes - Gigante and Normal.  The sign even says so, so it must be true. Furthermore, a Normal involves cheese.

So I laid down my 2,200 pesos and waited for the truth, which a guy that hadn't washed his hands since the 2010 earthquake brought to me.

     Now as you can see, the Gigante is a pretty big Ass.  The green stuff is avocado and the topping is mayonnaise, two things that are put on pretty much everything in Chile in prodigious quantities - and it definitely contributes to the Gigante appearance.  Okay, the moment of truth.  The first bite was pretty much just avocado and mayonnaise, so I had to be a trouper and go for bite number two.  The taste is hard to describe, so let's just say that the Ass Gigante is appropriately named for the way it tastes.  There you have it JKL, but feel free to order your own and compare notes.

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