If living abroad has taught me anything, it has been there is always a lot of waiting and usually you will have no idea what is going on. Yesterday was no different. Our driver only spoke Spanish, which was no big deal because I am used to being the only English speaker and being clueless. First stop, the police station. We get in the queue with hundreds of other people and wait for our number to be called. After waiting at least an hour, we make our way over to an officer who looked through our passports, visas and a few other papers and then took our photos, stamped our papers with an official police stamp and we were good to go. Easy enough, that only took about two hours so not bad all all. I should have known better.
Next stop, the building that issues the RUT numbers. The lady looks through our papers and PROBLEMA! Of course, that all was moving way too smooth. The numbers on our paper work did not match up with Ben's numbers. Our dates needed to be the same because we were issues our visas under him since he is the one working in the country. Whelp, back to the police station.
Now the police station is so packed you can hardly walk through the building. We make our way up to the same officer who proceeded to change all the dates on our paper work. New stamp, now back to the RUT building. Thankfully, I had the kids with me because we were moved to a special line that actually moved pretty fast. We had to get more photos taken and all be fingerprinted. The RUT numbers were issued and then realized they spelled Lincoln's name Lincolin. Let's hope they fix that. After a long day of waiting, we made it back to our house at 3:30! That was our first adventure in Santiago.
Few things I noticed right away about the city: 1. There is graffiti everywhere. 2. Traffic into the city is pretty minimal. I had heard the traffic is terrible in Santiago, but nothing compares to Bangkok traffic. We made it into the city without any stops in around 40 minutes. 3. All the cars on the road look really nice. I only saw a handful of cars that look junky or old, every other car looked like it was in really good shape. The taxis look really nice too. 4. Smog is going to be an issue. As we made our way into the city it was covered in a blanket of smog. It was gray, cold and overcast in the city. I'm thankful we live up in the mountains where the sky is much clearer and the sun shines.
That was adventure number one in Santiago. We made it through and lived to tell the tale. Oh, and my missing bag made it back to me!! Yay! I don't have any pictures from our outing on Tuesday, but I will leave you with a few photos from our neighborhood and our new dog. (More on his story later.)
Our new rescue dog. Name still being decided on.
Horses right outside my front door.
Britton was excited to see this. The plant life is interesting here. There are evergreens, palm trees, cactus, trees with leaves and trees without leaves. It's got everything covered.
There are really nice walking trails all over our neighborhood and it even has a stream running through it.
One of the many playgrounds in our neighborhood.
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