April 22nd, 2019
Today, Brendan was working on school, so I explored on my own. At first it was difficult for me not to have a phone (Brendan’s phone only works on WiFi so it doesn’t do much good when you are out exploring). However, I started to get used to not having my phone and relied on city maps to get around. The main thing I missed was being able to instantly communicate or send pictures of what I liked etc. I also couldn’t communicate with Brendan the times he stayed at the apartment to do school work. We had to do things the old fashion way like “I’ll meet you here at 5pm” etc. I also didn’t have Google Translate so was forced to figure out things using Spanish and hand signals. Our last day in Buenos Aires, I remember telling Brendan I would meet him at 5pm at the hostel. I ended up walking very far that day and realized around 4pm there was no way I would make it back by walking to the other side of town to meet him by 5pm. I changed my game plan because I was so concerned he would be worried if I wasn’t there at 5pm, and he had no way to communicate to me. I looked at the subway maps and headed to the closest subway line. After walking and exchanging 2 subway lines, I made it back to the hostel at 4:59pm. I remember feeling so proud of myself that I arrived right on time. When I walked in, we spoke and he asked: “what time is it?”. Lol… By the end of our time in Santiago I felt pretty confident about getting around without a phone. Today I walked up to the highest viewpoint of the city which was actually a good little hike. I planned to go to a museum as well, but the one I wanted to see happened to be closed on Monday. The viewpoint was really nice though, and I got to see how big Santiago is. The sad part is there is a lot of smog and pollution. One of the tour guides said you can only really get a good view of the beautiful mountains surrounding Santiago after it rains, or else there is just too much smog to really see the mountains.
After walking back down the huge hill of San Cristobal, and seeing the biggest spider of my life… I headed back to the apartment to get Brendan.
We then went out and got some more street food and wandered around for our last night. We went to bed really early as we had a super early flight the next day to Lima, Peru.