Santiago Airport

3:15AM 14/5 Melbourne time

1:15PM 13/5 Chile time

12:15PM 13/5 Peruvian time

So far it has been a very interesting experience! The flight to Sydney was fine, although breakfast was a bit disappointing (yucky muesli, an apple, orange juice and a muffin that was actually quite nice) Oh and I will warn you now, I am so exhausted and sleep deprived since I have now been up close to 24 hours, so if my spelling sucks or I’m not making sense I’m going to blame it on that! Back to my flight to Sydney… I had a very chatty guy next to me which was good in some ways but bad in others since it was very early for a sleepy teenager to be awake. Once I arrived at Sydney I was fine getting the shuttle bus but did freak out a little at customs! And they took my bottle of water which I hadn’t even opened! I was very annoyed about that! 

After customs I asked someone (yes dad would be proud of me) to direct me to my gate which I successfully found. The only annoying thing was that my flight got delayed by about 30mins so waiting in the lounge was pretty boring, especially with a dauntingly long flight ahead of you!

My flight from Sydney to Santiago took a total of 12:30 flying time so really it was like 14 hours if you count all the waiting and pre take off stuff. Anyway the first 3 hours went pretty quickly as I watched Argo which was awesome! Highly recommend it, although it is a bit heavy. I then went to sleep for about 2.5 hours trying to get my body clock to change to Peruvian time. The next 3 hours sucked! Dinner had already been served (which was actually my lunch) which came with a really yummy choc mousse with a layer of caramel on the bottom! It was so good I was close to asking for another one! So dinner was done, I’d had a nap and the flight was only half way through. Things were looking grim! Basically I watched another movie, read a little and went to the bathroom so many times! It was really nice to get off the plane since my arthritic knees were aching! I’ve done lots of laps around the airport to stretch my legs (and also to try and stay awake!).

Santiago airport is a whole different world! Even with my basic understanding of Spanish the language barrier is huge! They speak so fast! I think I’m going to have to learn how to say “please slow down!”. Customs was fine, although slight difficulties with where I was actually meant to go but I made it! Originally I was going to go straight to the gate that I’m leaving from but my ticket didn’t have it and I couldn’t find it on the board. So after much searching for someone to ask I finally asked the Chilean police with sniffer dogs! The guy was really nice and told me that the gate number hadn’t come out yet. How weird is that! Another interesting thing has been trying to get food! I was hoping that I would just be able to pay in US dollars but I had to go to a exchange and get some Chilean pesos. But the big question was how much do I get?! And the lady wasn’t much help. Anyway I got an ok amount I think and went and had a muffin at a café. The waiter was really nice and is clearly used to dealing with non-spanish speaking people. Paying was also very weird because its all really high digits. For example my muffin cost 990 pesos, which just didn’t compute in my brain. I almost gave him a note for 10 times the amount… opps! Hahah.

So that’s all to report for now.