Snapshots of my trip so far

Churrasco Italiano at a "German" restaurant in Santiago, near our hotel.

It's already 2:30 AM here, and I need to get to bed (I'm getting up at 8 to leave for what can only be a spectacular 6-hr drive to Santiago). Tonight I'm going to try and post pictures with a small description for each.

When touring the outskirts of Santiago looking for damage, we definitely had to inspect the Starbucks! (I have yet to see a McDonalds in Chile, however I have seen ads for it!)

This was my trio of fish appetizer. The pink fish is salmon, the one with white dots (sesame seeds) on the outside was the tuna, and the one coated in green onions was Chilean Sea Bass (cured ceviche style).

The amazing meal above came from the restaurant Como Agua Para Chocolate (lit. Like water from chocolate), in the Bellavista section of Santiago. The restaurant features a bed as the table closest to its entryway!

I love clouds, and thought this picture was worth sharing! It was on the drive towards Constitution and the temporary housing village we visited.

This is a sun halo I saw when we got to the temporary housing village. You can see some of the houses in the foreground.

A little more on sun halos, in case you were curious like me :)

A 22° halo is a halo, one type of optical phenomenon, forming a circle 22° around the sun, or occasionally the moon. It forms as sunlight is refracted in hexagonal ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere. As the light beam passes through two sides of the prism forming a 60° angle, the angle of minimum deviation is almost 22° (namely, 21.84° on average; 21.54° for red and 22.37° for blue). This wavelength-dependent variation in refraction causes the inner edge of the circle to be reddish while the outer edge is bluish. A 22° halo may be visible on as many as 100 days per year.
Light passing through the hexagonal ice prisms is deflected twice, which produces deviation angles ranging from 22° to 50°. Lesser deviation results in a brighter halo along the inner edge of the circle, while greater deviation contribute to the weaker outer part of the halo. As no light is refracted at smaller angles than 22° the sky is darker inside the halo.
22° halos form when the sky contains millions of variously oriented (poorly correlated) ice crystals. Some of these happen to be aligned perpendicular to the sun's light as viewed by any given observer, which produces the illuminated 22° circle, while other crystals produce the same phenomenon for other observers.
Like other ice halos, 22° halos appear when the sky is covered by thin cirrus clouds containing the ice crystals that cause the phenomenon. Small colourful coronas much nearer the sun produced by water droplets can occasionally be confused with 22° halos.

Here is the front of a temporary house (mediasagua) that someone has tried to make feel a little more like home. Stray dogs are common in the parts of Chile where we have traveled so far, but these likely belonged to people in the village. 

This is at the mouth of the Maule River into the Pacific, in Constitucion, Chile. Fishermen had just brought in their daily catch and were selling it to townspeople. You can see some of the destruction in the city, which was hit hard by the tsunami waves, in the background of the picture.

This was along the shore closest to where the Maule River and Pacific Ocean meet. There used to be many homes here, but they were all wiped out by the tsunami. This house had the most structure remaining for this whole section of coastal land (we think it had a second floor, which is completely missing). The only evidence for some other houses in the area was the remains of their foundation and a few sheared off pieces of rebar sticking out of the ground.

The next post will come from Santiago, and will hopefully get me up to date on my posts!

As always, thanks for reading!