Who turned out the lights?
October 7, 2011
So we took an overnight flight to Santiago Chile and arrived around 8am. It’s rather disconcerting to have an 11 hour flight and not have any time difference when you get there. Also I never sleep on the flight over so even though I was hyped on adrenaline and excited to be in Chile by the time we were eating dinner we were pretty tired. The Bed and Breakfast we were staying at had a restaurant across the street so we figured we would just go there for dinner. Shortly after ordering the power went out. No one at the restaurant really reacted, they just kept on serving food and brought a candle to our table. By the end of dinner I was looking at my friend thinking she looked as sleepy as I felt. We paid the bill and could even use our credit cards. Of course this ended up being the only night we rocked our heels and I managed to stumble down the pitch dark stairs but luckily only scraped up my arm. Then we stumbled across the dirt parking lot to the Bed and Breakfast. But at this point we saw that more areas were out than just our restaurant (it later turned out to be nationwide). When we’d arrived at our hotel in the morning the owner’s mother had been leaving and said the owner wouldn’t be back until the next day. She had given us a key code for the door but no key. Yes, an electronic key pass. Which of course wasn’t going to work when the power was out. The houses are all blocked off by fences with spikes on top and often with electric fence on top. The mother had given us the number to her other daughter…which we’d left in the hotel thinking we were just going across the street. So we stumbled back to the restaurant and tried in broken Spanish to explain the situation. They took us back across the street-in the dark, in our heels, but this time with a flashlight. They finally understood the problem was the power outage and tried calling the other daughter on the cell phone. They also tested the electric fence above the spiked fence and found THAT was still working (don’t ask me how). I couldn’t convince my friend that she could fit through the gap between the fences so we stumbled back to the restaurant where we had a nice Carmenere red Chilean wine on the house while they tried to figure out what to do with us. Luckily the glass of wine was about the right length of time for the power to come back on. Cause for the outage? Still unknown…
