Santiago, again

Well, I went back to Santiago for a few days, to get just a bit more time with Cesar and relax a bit. I needed that last bit quite badly, got super sick and spent my birthday doing unspeakable things. But, Santiago was great. Cesar´s mom took care of me during the day while Cesar tortured himself with the first month of grad school (pobrecito). I got to meet a lot of Cesar´s family, they were so nice to me!On friday night we went to a concert in the park, Carmina Burana no less. It was chaos getting a place to watch. Everywhere we tried we got chased out of, till we just sort of sat and pretended like we didnt get it (and I really didnt ;) till the music started and they left us alone. It was funny, the power went out halfway through, the musicians did an amazing job powering though that particular song, but we had to wait for them to fix it before the concert really continued, all of us sitting in the dark. Odd. Then, a novel experience for me, though pretty normal here I guess: they did an encore. I´ve never been to a classical music scene where they do encores. Another odd.
The night got more adventurous though. We went to a little hotdog stand that Cesar had raved about in our previous travels. Keep in mind that Chile is by far the safest county I´ve been to on this trip. We are hanging out, with two of Cesar´s friends, and in crew waving swords and guns comes running and holds the place up! We got away perfectly fine, if a bit shaken up, though there was a few moments under the table stuffing the crucial stuff down socks (or in my case with flipflops, very uncomfortably down underwear!) There were a couple of unfortunates who lost some stuff along with the restaurant, but no one got seariously hurt, so all´s well. It was one hell of an adventure! I still dont really belive it happened. Seemed too much like a movie or something.
Life calmed down after that. We went with Cesar´s mom to this great little town for lunch. But, remember how in the beginning I was laughing about how my trip to Chile was tracing the path of my previous trip? Totally unknown to me, this town was the same one I went to with Petra before! Argh! But, it was still fun, no complaints. Cesar ate a giant 1 kg empanada.
I got my last pastel de choclo, love that stuff!
It was hard to leave, but work called (ugh). The flight was horrible. I left on a late night from Santiago, got to Lima at 3 in the morning. But, I had to leave the terminal with all my baggage and recheckin. Unfortunately for me, all the checkin stands are closed at 3, shockingly. I spent the night in the McDonalds eating area, paranoid with all of my junk, in an airport famous for theft. Finally, at 7:30, they let me check in again. Another fun thing, the customs guy that night didn´t stamp my passport cause I wasnt really going to the country. But, the customs guy that morning wasn´t so cool with the fact that I had been there for 6 hours unprocessed. It all worked out, but it was unnerving. Then the airline needed volunteers to take a different flight, passing through Bogota. I got a $200 voucher for it, so why not? The rough part (other than the addition of another flight and airport layover) was that as we flew in to Bogota, I saw TONS of my plant out of the window and could do nothing about it. ARGH! The airport was interesting as well. got very thoroughly patted down (think, whoa! only my boyfriend can touch me like that!) Fun. Ha. Made it to Guatemala though.