Nearing the end in Chile

Ok, so after my thrilling adventure riding a horse, I was very happy to have my 2 feet on the ground; although I had the best time EVER that day!!!

Our original plans were to go back to BA the next day (Friday), but none of us wanted to leave without having time to spend in Vina Del Mar.
Why go to Chile and not check out one of the biggest tourist spots? So needless to say, we spent the next day walking around in Vina. We were actually pros at navigating the bus system by now so we had no problem getting there. It was probably less than a 10 minute ride via bus from Valpo to Vina. We got to Vina and were able to walk on the road that is right next to the water and the beach!! It was beautiful!!! Check out the 1500 (not literally, but there are quite a few!) pictures I just uploaded on my facebook this morning! We walked on the beach, and the scenery was just amazing! We must've walked close to 4 miles up and down the coast. We had lunch at some restaurant that I can't remember the name of, but it was pretty good. Luckily, at this point it was POURING rain, but we were inside eating. Like I said before, we just planned out everything perfectly!!! We also stopped in the Casino (right on the beach) earlier because David wanted to gamble. We also managed to squeeze in time to register for classes (bummer that we had to think about school on vacation!). We ended up back on the beach at night time as the sun came out again! In our desperate search for a bathroom, we stumbled upon this really nice mall. It was huge and had a bowling alley and a movie theatre. Being that we were on a roll with making good decisions we decided to see Toy Story 3 in spanish. FUNNIEST THING EVER. I can't even tell you how hard we all laughed because the movie is so much greater in a different language and I couldn't even explain why that is. Also, while waiting for the movie to start we thought it would be a great idea to visit the Mac store. We obviously took ridiculous pictures of ourselves on one of the computers, so that sometime down the road a Chileno can look and them and say, "Wow...those are some good looking americans." Hahaha I'm laughing at just the memory of how silly we were being.

Anyway, Saturday we had a bus ticket from Valpo to Mendoza to go home. THAT NEVER HAPPENED. After waking up at the crack of dawn, finding our way to the bus station, waiting at the bus station, being hungry at the bus station, having the bus show up a half hour late, finally getting on the bus an hour after we were supposed to, and driving 2 hours to Santiago, we turned around because the weather in the Andes mountains was too bad to cross the border. YES, another day in Chile!!! We were back in Valpo, so we decided to do some research on hostels because I think by this point we had worn out our welcome in the other one. We then went to this really cool seafood market that all of the sudden appeared in the streets. I'm not kidding when I say that people were cutting up fish right in front of our faces. Like that's sanitary? Anyway, we had a really cheap seafood lunch and it was cool being in the midst of such craziness!

We decided to stay in Vina this night, and we actually ended up in a great hostel! It was more like a hotel for that matter, but still very cheap. We ended up walking to the beach and watching the sunset slash taking silly pictures. It was a lot of fun, and I think it was the first sunset I've ever watched fully. Is that sad? We ended up going out for drinks that night with two people that we met in the hostel- one from Ecuador and the other from Canada. It was a pretty funny/weird night so I am just going to leave it at that haha.

We left the next morning without problems (luckily- I think we had had enough of traveling by then) and we were able to cross the border sin problemas! Even though we had to wait almost 2 hours just to get through. We ended up traveling for around 26 or 27 hours to get back to BA, but our trip was so worth it! We arrived Monday around 12:20 pm, and hey I had class at 2:30. So much for easing my way into the semester no? But no, we seriously had a blast, and it was one of the coolest trips I've taken!