Saturday, December 28

We had planned to wake up early to get a good start on seeing Santiago, but we actually ended up waking up around 11 and not being ready to go to the airport to get the rental car until around noon. When we got to the airport, there was a problem with the rental car, and I had to solve it for them because Katie wasn’t feeling confident enough with her Spanish. We finally got the car and promptly got stuck in a huge bit of traffic on the way to Patio Bellavista, where Katie wanted to take her family to lunch. We got a little lost on the way because Katie and I only know Santiago walking or by metro, never in car, but we got there eventually. We went to a little restaurant that Katie ate at her first day here and ordered some typical Chilean food for the family—chorillanas and empanadas.

We ate and then walked around the patio for a while because it’s a really gorgeous place. We were also waiting for my cousin Nacho, who lives in Santiago, because I wanted to leave Katie alone with her family and I had told him that we could hang out for a little while. He finally came and met us and I said goodbye to Katie’s family. Then Nacho and I walked a short way to the Santiago zoo, where we walked around looking at the animal exhibits and talking. It was a really good vocabulary exercise to learn all the animals’ names in Spanish.

It was burning hot outside and we were sweating a ton, but I still had a good time walking around and talking with Nacho for a few hours. I like him because he listens to whatever I have to say without interrupting me when my Spanish is horrible and impossible to understand.

Around 7, we took the metro back to the bus station and he put me on a bus to Rancagua and said goodbye. I spent the bus ride home listening to the Latin music I have had on my iPod since before I came to Chile and getting excited whenever I understood a new part that I didn’t used to understand. When I got back, I had to take a micro and a collectivo, and walk to get to my house. My foot was actually really hurting from the bee sting I had gotten the day before, so I was limping by the time I walked in the front door. My family was waiting to hear all about how meeting Katie’s family went. I told them it was amazing and made me really happy to see their family reunited. The only thing that I was looking forward to that I hadn’t received was this: when I first came to Chile, every little thing was exciting and new and awesome. The light switches, the plugs, the dogs in the street, the money, the streetlights, the license plates, and every little thing. Now these are all normal to me, so I was excited to relive that newness through them, but they took everything in stride and seemed thoroughly unimpressed. Anyway, that night my family went out all together to the movie theater to see The Hobbit in 3D. The movie started at 10 and didn’t end until a little before 1 in the morning. It was a great movie, but by the time it was over I was really tired and my toe was throbbing, so I wanted to go home. When I got home and took my shoe off, I was disgusted to find my toe with the bee sting to be incredibly swollen and red and nasty. I slept that night with it elevated and woke up a bunch of times to change the ice pack on it.