Vacation? What Vacation?

Trooper, car salesmen and us

Wow. These past few days have been jam-packed with long wait times, hunger, one small earthquake and a lot of cars. It took us 8 days to finally find a car. After the last post and the subaru hunt, we back tracked back into the world of SUVs. Neither of us were really digging the the low clearance and in general lacked enthusiasm for those subarus that met the criteria. Back to the drawing board we went, and FINALLY ( THANK YOU LORD) bought a 1989 Chevy Trooper. We saw over 2000 vehicles and took the metro across this city. Pretty much covered the entire thing... I'm so glad it's over. Here's a picture with us and Leo, our car salesman. He was so stoked to talk to Iain about surfing and obviously, Iain made a new friend.

The trooper with our bed building supplies

Once we found a car, we thought the rest would be fairly straight forward. However, as we've been learning, things don't really happen fast in Chile. Actually quite the opposite--painfully slow. The banking took forever, since we ended up needing a Chileano to come with us in order to take out cash from our visas. The Chileano was necessary only because it is way more convenient for the bank to say no to a foreigner than a Chilean. Once all of that craziness was dealt with, we thought it would be a good idea to go to a hardware store to gather supplies...another poor idea without eating lunch first since Chile has a way of making a simple purchase take about 4 hours. You can't simply pick it out and pay... there are multiple numbers and receipt scanning and waiting....and waiting more... eventually we got the stuff to build a bed frame after both of us almost died from hunger in the all day process. Iain reported that his vision was going he was so hungry... and lord help us, Iain needs to eat. The picture below is Iain sawing our wood purchases to fit inside the vehicle.

Nothing comes easy...
especially when your last clean T-shirt is a long sleeve
and it's 36 degrees

I am praying that tomorrow will hopefully be our last day in Santiago. It is time to leave this place for awhile. It is busy, smoggy, loud, and lacking in fun. It is taking so long to run errands because 1) we are terrible at understanding Spanish directions 2) our map is ripping and for some reason can not find another one anywhere 3) there are no street signs and driving is insane (apparently multi-lane highways do not need lines...) 4) most things occur at a snail's pace.

On a positive note several awesome things have happened in the midst of the chaos: a) We had two really great Spanish lessons with an electrical engineer that needed to learn English that we randomly meet on the metro and got some really interesting info about Chile's history b) Yesterday we hit up the mall and got almost all of the things we need to live independently in our troop and we both found ripcurl wetsuits on sale. c) we still love each other d) we ate lunch today and it was revolutionary and fantastic.

Iain drinking his fresh squeezed fruit juice at lunch