Chile Part 1

For the next several days (ok, who am I really kidding—it will probably take at least a week) I plan to recap our South America trip, as much for my benefit as for yours. I used to keep somewhat of a diary of my travels, but this trip in particular was WAY too dang busy to do anything in our free time except bathe and sleep… and sometimes, bathing was sacrificed for sleep.

I wish I were kidding.

So yes—I’d like to write everything down while it’s still fresh in my mind, and of course I will try to make it as entertaining for you as possible. ;)

The trip was sponsored by Matthew’s company, and so we basically had to follow the schedule they had arranged for us—and it was a pretty darn rigorous one! Mostly every day was packed full of sightseeing tours, activities, or just plain traveling from one country to another, and by the end of each afternoon, we were given only a couple hours to rest and get ready for another fancy shmancy dinner where you endured a minimum of two torturous hours of small talk with strangers (strangers to me, anyway).

I learned a couple things about myself on this trip.

Number 1: Apparently I am rather uncultured and have a terribly unrefined palate. In other words, I hate fancy, gourmet food. Maybe I’ve lived in Texas too long, but after only a few days of eating “the best food South America has to offer,” I was ready to vomit up my salmon mousse and not walk, but RUN to the nearest greasy burger joint.

One day I even played hookie on a fancy dinner and ordered a room service burger, but it was sadly disappointing. Unfamiliar spices and a strange flavoring to the beef rendered that burger inedible. Turns out a “fancy” burger isn’t nearly as delicious as a non-fancy one.

I lost five pounds on this trip, primarily because mostly all I ate was fruit. It’s hard to mess THAT up!

Thing number 2 that I learned about myself is that I’m really pretty antisocial. All of the socializing required by this trip was utterly and completely exhausting for me. Luckily, Matthew is kind of the same way. One day, we were chatting about how the “other people” probably really enjoyed all the small talk, but try as we might, we would never be like those “other people.” And we decided that that was perfectly OK.

However, despite what may seem to be a griping start to this vacation recap, I would like to clarify that I would not trade our experiences over the last couple weeks for anything in the world. While the trip was far from a relax-by-the-pool-with-a-mai-tai type, it was an education and an adventure.

Next post I’ll talk a little about our disaster at the Santiago airport (let’s just say our trip got off to a slightly rocky start, and I was mildly concerned that Matthew might be arrested and thrown into a Chilean prison), but for now I’ll sign off with the first round of pictures from Chile!

Rooftop deck of the W Hotel, Santiago…