Lauren: Walking.

So we've been doing a lot of walking around this city. We see really gorgeous architecture, tons of fountains and statues, street vendors, you name it. If it's around Santiago, we've probably seen it. Walking around a city, you just get to see more of it than speeding past it in a car.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm a big public transportation/walking fan, and this city is good for the latter. Walking however, can be a bit tricky.

Cars here are extremely pedestrian unfriendly. Crosswalks less designate a place where cars have to stop for people crossing the street, but more accurately mark the place where walkers are allowed to run from cars speeding toward them. No matter what the signal reads at an intersection, cars push forward through pedestrians who often rush crossing the street.

I remember seeing taxies inch through packed crosswalks in New York, but this is far worse. Cars turning on red jolt into crowded pedestrian walkways at alarming speeds.

The boundaries of a crosswalk mean nothing to cars. There are two lines designating the area where people can walk in the street, like in most cities. But here cars zoom up to the first line, regularly sitting in the crosswalk. I almost got hit by a taxi during my early jog this morning, when the taxi driver sped up to the first line of the pedestrian walkway.

There is a lot of jaywalking, though, sometimes across four lanes of traffic. So if you wait long enough you can just walk across the street when there aren't cars.

On a positive note, at least there isn't the car culture that there is in LA and people actually walk around their city on a regular basis.

-- Lauren

Photo courtesy of Flickr.