thur 15 feb 2007

thursday, began a bit slow but i finally got out and wandered down to this travel agent's office who had been recommended to me. i got there and it was closed, so i walked down this ramp and there was a guy sitting on a park bench reading, i walked up to him and said ola. he responded in spanish and i immediately defaulted to english, he was also waiting for the agent as we spoke i told him about my application to ywam in perth to which he informed me that he was the director of the ywam facility in pichilemu, this all seemed quite the strange coincidence. turns out pichilemu has the most consistent waves in the world. so i ran around with mitch and his director of the dts program for the rest of the afternoon.

we ended up at this mall that looks like something right out of southern california, they even had a hooters restaurant. this was very strange, as so many of you think i'm in constant danger down here. chile is actually the most stable nation in south america, all that fruit they export to the states in the winter has done them well. we parted ways at the mall so i had to find my way back to the central part of town. this became another adventure, santiago had been in the midst of a whole public transportation overhaul. rather than phasing the system in they decided to do it all at once: change routes, instigate a credit system to eliminate cash on the buses. the card is called a bip card and credit is deducted when the card is passed by a reader. this became an issue because they failed to produce enough bip cards to meet the demand, as a result there was chaos in the streets over the weekend, the planners chose to let everyone ride for free to quell the storm, this backfired as many people chose to ride the bus since it was free. at least they did have the forethought to make this change over during the summer when most people are on vacation.

i managed to get a bip card and then a cab driver who was loaded with 4 people already offered me a ride. i got in and soon we weren't heading where i wanted to go. he eventually dropped us in a part of town where there was a main bus transit intersection. so i found a map and a bus. back to town. that evening i checked my email only to discover that one of the references was turned in to perth. this left me a bit confused. i've since come to realize that this saved me from having to track them down again and request that they resubmit to pichilemu.