chile:travel.and.santiago.

early morning 8.7.12 marked the beginning of our month-long trip to chile. jerome drove us to the airport, we checked in (and checked our over-stuffed bags), went through security and finally were off.

our first flight tickets and my grumpy passport photo

waiting to board this early calls for starbucks
our flight plan was: LAX to houston, houston to panama city, and panama city to santiago.  the flights were about 4 hours for the first two and close to 6 hours for the last one with hour long layovers in-between. it really wasn’t bad at all. we met some characters along the way – the girl sitting next to us on our first flight had just graduated from davis so that was funny. the lady who sat next to me on the second flight was from san antonio and was going to visit a friend from panama for a week, which she blabbed to me in the last 30 minutes of the flight after downing 4 airplane bottles of wine.  she was practically laying in my lap it was pretty entertaining. then on our last flight we met a kid who was going on a ski trip to argentina and it turns out he was from squaw valley and went to high school with some kids truckee knows. small world.  for a majority of the flight I worked my way through this book:

which is a woman’s memoir about her hike through the pacific crest trail, from the mojave desert to washington all by herself. it definitely inspired me and got me into an adventurous, independent mood, perfect timing as we has just landed in santiago!

we paid our reciprocity fee and went through customs pretty easily, Truckee got her trail mix confiscated but for some reason mine was ok? i don’t know. i had a minor panic when my debit card was rejected from the atm but called the bank and they worked it out for me. at this point it was about 7 am on the 8^th and we waited for our new friend andrés (a friend of truckee’s friend from home) to pick us up. i made a buddy in the airport.

andrés arrived and drove us from downtown to his home up near the mountains where he lives with his parents, older brother, and younger sister.  their house was so cute and he made us a little breakfast of tea and toast while his cat eddie watched from the cold. poor kitty, he’s not allowed inside.

we showered and andrés dropped us off in the neighborhood bellavista on his way to university.  we wandered around and saw lots of cool sculptures

and street art

and architecture

we met a nice waiter named ricardo who told us we should go up the san cristóbal hill on this weird little tram, so we did to kill some time, and figured we were entitled to do one super-touristy thing.  we got to the top and could see the whole city of Santiago

and then climbed up a little more to the immaculate conception statue

 

 

we looked for a bathroom but after finding out we had to pay to use it (!) we played with this little kitty instead.

and looked around the gift shops, and found someone’s proclamation of love to ricky on the wall

we came back down and wandered around some more waiting for andrés so we could go to lunch and found more cool street art.

we sat out on the patio of a restaurant for lunch and unfortunately since the only chilean dishes they had were meat dishes I got...pizza. which was delicious, and truckee got a chilean empanada with beef, eggs, and onions which she said was awesome. andrés took us to an artisan craft fair after lunch with pottery, jewelry, clothing, etc and it was super cool because all of the artists were doing their work right there in the shops so we got to watch! there was also a pet store with PUPPIES, chinchillas, birds, bunnies and a huge pen full of the biggest roosters I’ve ever seen, peacocks, and a duck with a pom-pom looking thing on its head.

we got back to andrés’ house and both passed out for a couple of hours watching the olympics, the long day of travel and no sleep finally catching up to us.  when we woke up we had a REAL chilean dinner with the whole family, they were all so nice and the little sister daniela is studying abroad at uc irvine next year, she is majoring in theater and she was asking us all about it. we had salad, (andrés put soy sauce on his?) and a bean dish with pumpkin, noodles, and peppers it was de-lish.  after dinner andrés took us to the bus station and we caught our bus at 9:30 for an all-nighter arriving in pucón at 7:30 a.m. it had the comfiest seats

and we had a failed photoshoot. i think we were too tired to look even a little bit cute, or work the camera right so we just ended up with a lot of pictures like this:

but anyways, i'd say overall, successful first two days!