This is What Happens When We Don't Have Internet All Day

I am really tired tonight, so I might not get my entry posted. On the other hand, we are getting up at 3:00, which right not is in two and a half hours, so I’ll probably just stay up til we leave.

Anyway, today ended up being one of my favorite days here in Chile. After breakfast, we went back to the mall-ish area for our second chance at Pricewaterhouse Cooper. Remember they were the company we had to reschedule on Tuesday. We were dropped off at a huge office building for our meeting at PwC. We were directed to go to the conference room, passing a large framed Chilean flag with signatures penned all over. The director of [some fancy title here; he did something with due diligence] spoke to us, and it was a long-winded speaking. Unknowingly, he replicated major parts of his presentation from almost every other visit we made this week. He told us many stories, including the one about the flag. Chile’s main export is copper, which means mining is a huge industry in the country. PwC works very closely with large mining corporations, even employing an accountant whose husband was one of the 30+ miners caught in the mine collapse. The signed flag was a token of appreciation for the support of that family by PwC.

The last part of his lecture was very interesting. He started talking about the operations of the Santiago branch and about the diversity of employees. He then pulled in three of his subordinates to speak to us. The gentleman was from the UK, and the two ladies were from Brazil and South Africa. We opened the floor for questions, then broke off after and spoke more personally. Tyler and I chatted with the South African who took a special interest in my aspirations to be an actuary and my Ghana internship. It was awesome to speak to professionals and to network.

After our PwC visit, we took a small bus tour of historic Santiago, put on by our tour guides Polo and Guillermo. Polo left us part way through the tour; he has been awesome to take care of us on our trip.  He and Guillermo are really knowledgeable about Santiago. The bus tour was only partially engaging. I read a chapter or two in my book The Kite Runner.

After we returned to the hotel, Brennon, Alex, myself, Susana, and Dave made a trip to the Santiago temple.

We hopped on the metro and walked several blocks and found the temple. The temple is on a campus with many other church buildings: a distribution center, a CCM (Spanish for MTC), and mission offices for the Santiago missions. The grounds are peaceful, even though they are not off the beaten path.

We stepped inside and the first thing I noticed were the beautiful, and I mean GORGEOUS, tile work. Lapizlazule is this beautiful blue stone that is only found in Chile, and it was incorporated into the stonework in the floor and on the recommend counter. The lobby is now my favorite temple lobby.

I pridefully did the session with out translation, which made it hard to pay attention. I also did the veil ceremony in Spanish, which was also difficult mainly because the man helping me was hoarse, and I could barely hear him. The celestial room was brilliantly white, and I was hoping they would incorporate the blue stone in there, but there was not much stonework anyway.

On our trip back, it was rush hour, and the metro was packed. It was so crammed; we were shoulder to shoulder, butt to butt, jammed together like the junk in my suitcase. We barely squeezed out on our stop and trekked back to our hotel, where we were finally able to undress for the day. I started packing my bags, mingled with Internet browsing and visits to amigos. We had a late dinner at some Italian place the other guys had visited earlier, where because we were so late (11:30 ish), the selection was slim. I enjoyed what I ordered, but Aniko was forced to order some pasta with sauce that tasted like nasty BBQ Spaghetti-o sauce.

The plan was to stay up until we had to leave. We didn’t get back to the hotel until half past midnight, and we had to get up at three, so why not just make an all-nighter out of it. But as I was writing, I was falling asleep, so I called it quits and slept for an hour or two.