Profound Discoveries

    Since I'm on this new walking kick, I convinced Jess to meet me at a halfway point between where we're each staying now, which happened to be near to the Plaza de Pedro de Valdivia. On my way there, I stumbled across two awesome little places. One was a weird nautical-looking restaurant that you couldn't see into (but you could if you reached your camera over the wall, haha). A man nearby saw me taking pictures and explained that it was a casino and club for sailors and men in the Navy when they returned home for a break. How nice!

  

The second find I made was this beautiful building right across the street: 

 Apparently made in 1897...

 That looked like this inside:

Gorgeous! It was such an opulent house (mansion?) and I was just spying through the doors when a lady told me to come in. She gave me a private tour of the place, for free! Only the first floor, but that was awe-inspiring enough for one visit. A famous family named Falabella (yes after the store chain haha) was the first to inhabit this luxurious home, though now it is used for different municipal purposes, mainly meetings. There was a salon for the men to meet and discuss important matters, while the women had their own to do their hair and wear dresses in. Almost all of the materials you see are originals, the floors, wood, the rugs, the statues and carvings. It was wonderful to walk through. A real treasure of Santiago.
     Finally, I tore myself away from the lavish house and ran to meet Jess, arriving at the park at the same time as she. And what a pretty little park it is! It even had this awesome kiosk, where they had books, magazines, and newspapers seemingly for temporary check-out and free wifi (SCORE!)

 Sadly, we hadn't thought to bring our iPhones 

to snapchat everyone. Thankfully, I did bring my 

digital camera, whereupon we commenced the 

jumping pictures, photoshoots in random

places, and macro-shoots of ALL the flowers. My "discovery" stems from this stupendous Macro function where you get to shove your camera waaaay into a flower's personal space and take out of this world pictures of them. While I restrained myself a bit and mostly took pictures with Jess, once she left and I walked home, I shot as many pictures as I could of any different flower, and some seeds, around me.
     We had a lovely time in the plaza and after we exhausted our photographic capabilities, we sat and read or wrote for a while. I currently have two lonely Good Housekeeping magazines down here with me (shoutout to Aunt Cacky; thanks!) but am already almost finished with them and am so sad. If anyone out there has homey, cooking, food, cleaning, organizing, Real Simple-y, mom, or any other magazine of that kind and is finished with them, I would love your recyclables ;) After I finish, if I can part with them, I'm going to donate them to my office so other language teachers can enjoy them on the bus or bring them to class to use as American realia (real life language material from an authentic source). We caved and got Pizza Hut for a late lunch; it was delicious, though still not quite as good as authentic American Pizza Hut.
     The one dark spot on what was a lovely day, I feel I must bring up because I would like to ask all of you your opinion on it. When the older gentleman earlier explained what the sailor's club was, he kept walking with me for a bit to chat, and while I was polite, I didn't stick around long because one I had to meet Jess, and two, I am still a bit over-cautious when talking to men down here in South America. Later on, I felt badly that I had been so judgmental regarding this kind old man who probably was just curious about me, being the foreigner that I am. So, when I walked back and saw an old man sitting in the same place, wearing a similar shirt, I thought it was the same guy and I said Hello, how are you? He asked me to sit down and I thought, 'oh fine, I was mean before. Ok, what could it hurt'. We had a nice conversation for a few minutes, talking about where I'm from and what I'm doing here, etc. He punctuated it with kind, but slightly awkward remarks about how pretty I was, to which I responded with Oh haha, thank you. Then, we talked about him and his family a bit, until suddenly, (it's always suddenly) he asked me to kiss him. I mean, really? What am I missing about these other cultures that I didn't see that coming. Granted it was actually a different guy than earlier (oops, my bad) but why do men have to be weird like this? Now I feel justified at being standoffish to the first man, even though he was nicer and not creepy like the second man was. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear some other opinions.
   Anyway, enough with my ranting. Overall, it was a lovely Sunday, and I'm glad Jess and I enjoyed our afternoon in the sun. What did you all do with your Sundays? Let me know :) ¡Chao!