Santiago

We arrived in Santiago at about 7:30 in the morning Santiago Time, which is 5:30 back home. We didn't get too much sleep on the airplane because it wasn't extremely comfortable, so we were pretty tired by the time we got through customs the second time. I guess we'd better explain that. When we went down the escalator after getting off the plane there was a sign saying reciprocity fee that looked like it was to a line of booths right by the bottom of the escalators. We got in the line and made it to the booth where they told us we had to pay our reciprocity fee which was in another line to the left back behind the escalators where we couldn't see it before. So we went and paid the fee and went through customs again. When we walked out of the airport we were bombarded by taxi and van drivers wanting us to take their vehicles to the city. One of them was pretty persistent and with our limited Spanish we told him that we were going to look at our map first and sit down to decide what we wanted to do. After studying our map and the plans we already had we told him we were going to 'coger el bus,' which in some countries means take the bus, but we later found out that its a bit more vulgar in chile. Woops! The taxi driver didn't mention it though. He was kind and told us where to catch the bus and where to get off to catch the metro. So we took the bus and metro to downtown Santiago without any problems.

After getting off the metro we started walking the wrong direction towards the temple, but somebody asked us where we were going and gave us directions to the temple. We walked about 8 blocks before reaching it, walking along side a bicycle lane as we arrived.

We went to the Temple lodging behind the temple where we received our rooms. Unfortunately, the temple lodging has separate rooms for men and women, even if they are married. Jen was able to meet some lovely ladies in her room, but there was never any other guy in Josh's room when he went in. We had a gorgeous view of the Temple with its pretty flowers and fountain.

We did some sealings and an endowment session on Friday night. We were both so tired and had trouble staying awake. We did some sealings the following morning and then went to our hostel in downtown Santiago.

That day we walked around Santiago a little bit and while walking through the Parque Florestal we came across Abe Lincoln.

While walking through the park we also found a playground with the coolest playground equipment I've seen. It had this polyhedral shaped object with ropes through it to climb around on. So we joined all the little kids playing on it.

At the end of the park we saw this interesting piece of grafitti.

Afterwards we stopped by at the Museum of fine arts. It happened to be free this day.

After visiting the Museum and skating around on their slick wooden floor we walked down the street to Cerro Santa Lucia. We climbed up to the top and had a great view of the whole city. We snapped a few photos, but they don't do justice to what we saw.

By this time Jen was extremely hungry, thirsty, and had a headache (it had been much longer than the two hours she is used to going without meals). We passed by the Plaza de Armas while looking for a place to eat and took a picture of this statue.

After getting a bit of food we went to the supermarket and saw this little girl doing her own grocery shopping.

We bought a frozen pizza, took it back to our hostel, heated it up and ate it. We listened to the Bourne Identity a little bit before going to bed.