Natali Nuñez in Chile

Natali is one of my best friends from high school, and in a phone conversation several months back, I had told her I was headed to Chile. Realizing that she had some money saved up and a friend in a foreign country to visit, this thus began the journey of Grace and Natali in Chile. She arrived last Monday and stayed with me for the entire 10 days! My homestay mother had a spare room, so Natali got quite a deal ($16/day including breakfast!) for a single room and a Grace Wu to accompany her. Let's begin this post with our "couple shots" because I have ~500 pictures and I need to divide them up in some sort of organized, logical, and interesting fashion.

Waiting/Studying the book of Daniel for Bible study the afternoon that Nat was scheduled to arrive.

Look who's here!!

We visited the Santiago Baha'i offices because Natali wanted to buy some Spanish Baha'i materials. This is next to the Baha'i center model that will be constructed in 2013.

Outside the Baha'i Center.

Visiting Emporio La Rosa, my favorite cafe in Santiago. Natali is helping me with my class readings because I don't understand the words in Spanish.

Us on top of one of the hills in Valparaiso.

Natali with the Chilean po-pos, otherwise known as carabineros. We had very good experiences with them while we traveled around. This one gave us directions around Valparaiso and was kind of good looking.

These, although not quite as handsome, were very helpful as well. We had no idea where to go to see snow, so we found 3 carabineros walking on the street. These were the two that were more fun-loving. The 3rd one was more on the cautious side and didn't want to play with us and didnt want to take a picture with us either. In Chile it's illegal to take pictures of military officials because according to the carabineros, it might surface on the internet and people might do something disrespectful with the image. However, these carabineros were amused at our touristy-ness I think they made an exception with us. Anyway, we ran to them and asked them which bus we needed to take to see snow. They escorted us to a random street corner that had no bus stop sign or anything. So I asked him, "Where's the bus stop?" The carabinero on the left said, "We are the bus stop." Then, when a bus was approaching, the carabinero on the left stepped in the middle of the street, blew his whistle, and made the bus halt to a stop in the middle of traffic! Then he signaled us to go on that bus. When we entered, the entire bus and the looked at us as puzzled as to what just happened. The bus driver, that poor man, he was so alarmed by a cop telling him to stop because he thought he was going to get a ticket. All he was doing was picking up some American tourists. Haha.

And we got to the snow, thanks to the po-pos!

And after playing in the snow, a delicious lunch of pastel de choclo!