chile - day one

what a long ass day.

at 6 am while my father slept i was able to get the footage i set out to capture and then some. what a beautiful view the andes mountains are from 40,000 feet.

once we landed the three of us stumbled sleepy into the airport. once inside we got to spend the rest of the morning getting sniffed by drug dogs and got to play latin american's most notorious guessing game:"have they lost my luggage?"
for about two hours.
once cleared by a mobile customes agent, we spent the afternoon in my dad's hometown of viNa del mar getting my mom's new car.
a YARIS? does that mean anything to anyone?
after car shopping and a few car arguments between the loving couple, we went to our favorite seafood dive by their apartment.

being in chile again doesn't feel like when i was here two years ago.
this feeling resembles that certain point in your life where you can measure how much you've changed, possibly progressed, based on certain markers.
my parents have progressed in their own way, as they keep going up up and up, sometimes in the most literally way. not to say they haven't move forward in certain personal areas but these but structural physical markers, for me, leave a much larger imprint.
two years ago, in the same building, they were on the 14th floor with a two bedroom apartment which included a small kitchen and a modest ocean view... now? they sold the other condo and bought a three bedroom apartment with two bathrooms and a much larger baloney which faces the ocean on the corner of the building towards viNa and valparaiso. this pattern reminds me of when we came back to canada from chile when i was five years old. we all lived in a two bedroom apartment with my aunt's family (ten people in total) and my sisters slept in a closet. it was the exact size of a used ikea bunk bed. building it inside the very small walk-in closet with a perfect fit, was a feat of its own. every morning i would jump out of a bed, which i shared with my two other cousins, and would run to their closest door and yell "goodmorning!" i think it was the novelty of them sleeping in this closest that excited me. i probably even a bit jealous. from there we moved to our own one bedroom apartment on the fifth floor and after that a two bedroom. my parents took the smaller room and gave us the master bedroom to share. i have good memories from those days. like playing practical jokes on each other and one-on-one soccer in the hallway with my younger sister daniella. the practical jokes usually consisted of us climbing under the other siblings bed and waiting for the right moment, just before they are about climb into their sheets. we would then grab their foot, sometimes both, and yell "TAAAH!"
instant reaction.
the victim would usually jump about three feet in the air and then proceed to calm themselves down by yelling fierecfully at the colperate(s) till my parents broke up all the screams and laughter. from there we moved to a three bedroom. in this place i had my own bedroom and my sisters shared the larger room. for first couple of months i remember missing our military bunker before falling asleep in my own space. after this we moved into our first house in ERIN MILLS (mississauga) where we all had our own bedrooms, as we once did when we lived in chile. that house was great and i still wished we had stayed there. !pero! mi mama, wanted a bigger kitchen and a bigger back yard and a bigger and a bigger and a bigger. so we moved to a much larger house at about the age of 14 where we stayed till i left home at 18.

finding a home in any home has been a good training ground for easy travel but there is nothing like coming back to your own house after a lengthy trip.



the view here is so beautiful...