The Flight

The night before my flight to Santiago, my parents surprised me by taking me out, just the three of us, to a nice dinner at one of their favorite restaurants. That may not seem like a big deal to most, but when you have 5 kids in your family, trust me, it’s huge. The next morning, I woke up and did my final errands before struggling to get both my suitcases under 50 pounds. My stepmom, Sharon, made my favorite lunch – a homemade roasted tomato soup with grilled cheese. It takes her about 5 hours to make that soup (she hand roasts the tomatoes herself!) Combined with grilled cheese sandwiches on Italian bread, I couldn’t have dreamt up anything better.

            After lunch, the whole family drove into the Logan International Airport to drop me off. (Everyone except my sister Niki, who had to work). We drove in around 4 pm, which with a ridiculous amount of traffic, got us there around 5:15 pm. We then proceeded to park the car and all six of us marched into Terminal B in search of Air Canada.

The whole crew at Legal Sea Food's

 At the Air Canada baggage check, I met up with Kyle. He had taken  the bus from Maine to Logan so that we could fly together. We checked our bags and then realized we had about an hour and a half until boarding so my dad offered to take us across the terminal to Legal Sea Foods for a quick bite before they left to go home. I wasn’t very hungry but I wasn’t about to pass up my last few moments with my family so Kyle and I happily joined them. After our meal, we walked back to security and Kyle and I got ready to board our flight!

About to go through security!

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Our first flight went to Toronto, Canada and from there we got our second flight to Santiago, Chile. It’s interesting because most people assume Toronto is super north (I was one of those people at first) but if you take a close look at a map, it’s actually at almost the same latitude as Boston. So really, we just happened to go west, not north, before heading south.

 It was a 2-hour flight to Toronto followed by a 2-hour layover before our daunting 10-hour flight to Santiago. The flight to Toronto was nothing special but the Toronto airport was really cool. They had this restaurant that had iPads set up at every chair at every table (including the bar), all completely hooked up to the internet that you could use for free or if you were hungry, while you ate. That passed the time waiting to board our flight to Chile, along with my first ever trip to Tim Horton’s, which I would compare to America’s Dunkin Donuts for those who have never been (DD’s is obviously way better). 

Toronto Airport

             The plane to Santiago was one of the biggest one’s I’ve ever been on. There were 10 seats in a row, broken up into 3 then 4 then 3. The plane had over 70 rows broken up into Business Elite, Business Class and Economy sections. Passing by those Business Elite sections with the individual swivel chairs and foot rests really made me wish I had the extra $1,000 to splurge for a seat up there. I put my carry-on bag in the section before me because I could see there was limited overhead space in my section. Well, about 10 minutes before take off someone reported a bag left in the middle of the aisle. I got up to check since it fit my bag’s description and what do you know, someone has taken out my bag and left it on the floor! That caused a few moments of rushing around trying to find an open space. I couldn’t believe someone had the audacity to do that! Luckily, there was space closer to me so I was able to keep an eye on it during the flight.

            

I slept a majority of the time we were in the air, so I don’t remember much of the actual plane ride. The food was subpar, as to be expected for plane food, and I wasn’t particularly interested in any of the movies or TV shows they offered. I woke up just in time to see us gliding over the mountains preparing for landing. 

After going through passport control and customs, I finally met my host parents, Gaby and Sergio. They were waiting for me outside of customs with a big sign with my name on it. They were much younger than I expected (I was told they have 4 grandchildren – but they couldn’t be much older than late 50’s!) and Gaby embraced me right away. She hugged me multiple times with a beaming smile and told me I had a pretty face. She was kissing my cheeks and calling me her “hija” (daughter) before we left the airport and for the rest of the day kept checking in to bring me things or see if there was anything in particular that I needed. I unpacked all the essentials but was pretty tired so after lunch I was thrilled to go lie down in my quiet room for a while. After waiting what I felt was the appropriate amount of time to ask for the Wi-Fi password (approximately 1.5 hours) I hooked up all my devices and was able to contact my family as well as Kyle and Emily, my friends in Santiago. From there, Kyle, Emily and I made plans to meet up after dinner so Emily could introduce Kyle and I to some of her friends that she’s made here! Despite my tiredness, I couldn't NOT go see her and her friends and I'm so glad that I did.

Celebrating my first night in Chile at Emily's apartment!