I landed in Santiago de Chile after midnight, after a 24-hour travel day with multiple layovers. Therefore, I decided to book an airport hotel that also included pick-up from the airport. This ended up being a Hilton Hotel, and they picked me up with a luxurious but also enormous van, which was a bit absurd considering it was just me.

When I finally got to my room, I took a much needed shower and then immediately fell asleep. The next morning I went to get a sim card, which was somehow a lot harder than expected, and then no ATM would work with any foreign cards, so I had to walk more than half hour in the burning sun and scorching heat to get to a hopefully functioning ATM.

It did thankfully work, and I got an amazing empanada to celebrate. After I had picked up my luggage from the hotel, I made my way to the Bus Terminal to catch my bus to Valparaiso, which is where I would be staying the next three weeks.

When I got to Valparaiso, the first thing I noticed was how cold it was. In Santiago it had been 35 degrees and in Valparaiso it was 14. Truthfully, I was not prepared for that at all, and had imagined Valparaiso to be a nice beach-y destination, but as I quickly learned the water was even colder than the air, so I unfortunately never went swimming.

I did work in construction while there, and I definitely learned a lot through that. I had a lot of fun seeing the progress I was making in just a few hours, and while the work was definitely hard, it was also rewarding and satisfying.

Unfortunately Valparaiso as a city is very unsafe, especially for me, so I did not do much exploring.

I did explore Cerro Concepcíon, which I truly enjoyed. The street art was gorgeous and the colorful houses just had such a nice vibe to them, it was really nice to walk through.

The minute the sun set I started feeling unsafe though, and quickly made my way back. I did go on daily walks to the sea and enjoyed sun sets, but unfortunately I was followed quite often, and could not go out with my headphones or even my phone visible, which dampened the experience.

But, the fact that I could not really do much in the city did have an upside, since I spent my days at the cafe up the street working on my university applications, which took up a very big chunk of my December, and I am very glad that I finished the majority before I went to New Zealand.

When Christmas was approaching the house turned into a cookie factory and I helped bake hundreds of cookies for the entire extended family.

I learned a lot from that too, like how to use a mortar and pestle, which I never seriously had to do before. On Christmas Eve, a big part of the extended family came and we had so much food and a lot of fun. Unfortunately the Chilean Spanish is majorly different from any of the others, so I truly couldn’t understand anything, but had fun nonetheless.

A few days later, New Years eve rolled in, and a different set of family members came to celebrate. Once again we had so much food, but we also had a prime position in the house to see the fireworks over the water, so at almost midnight we all gathered on the balcony to wait for them to fill the sky. They were absolutely gorgeous and went on for about 20 minutes. When they finished, I realized how tired I was, and excused myself to go to sleep.

The days after I started gathering my things to go to New Zealand, since I had to leave for the airport on the 4th, and time was passing very fast.

On the fourth I took an uber to the Bus Terminal, but unfortunately we got stuck in a protest and I started getting really anxious about missing my bus and then my flight. But my uber driver performed a miracle and got me to the bus terminal with two minutes to spare, so I was able to jump into the bus, as it was just about to leave.

I got to the airport without any other problems and then had to wait until almost 2am to fly. I did get a first row extended leg room seat, which was lovely, but the 23 screaming babies and toddlers on a 13 hour overnight flight weren’t very lovely. I did take care of one of the babies for a few hours, so his parents could get some rest, as I usually cannot sleep on flights anyways and he was a truly fun baby.