Ok so I’m an idiot when it comes to catching planes. I’ve had so many close calls and yet I keep doing the same thing and not allowing myself those 2 hours they always say you need… Well my friend Erin (she’s also in Copiapo) and I decided to climb Cerro San Cristobal thinking the whole ordeal would take us about 2 hours. Well since it was a beautiful Sunday day, it was super crowded. It ended up taking us about 2 hours to climb to the top and thinking it would be quicker to take the funicular, or tram, down we ended up waiting in an hour line to get down the mountain. The hike up was worth it though, it was so beautiful and a great view of Santiago. At the top is this huge white statue of the Virgin Mary with her hands outstretched to the city, kinda City of God/Rio de Janero style. I’m not sure if the stress it causes us at the airport was worth it however.
We ended up leaving super late for our 5:55pm flight back to Copiapo. We got to the airport at 5:20pm and had a huge line to wait in at the check in. We get up to the front and we ask an attendant if we’ll still be able to make our flight and he makes a call into his phone/walkie talky and says we are very lucky. He lets us cut and sends us to the first open attendant. She puts in our info and finds that the flight is closed, like we were told earlier, but we told her “No! That guy just told us we were very lucky!” So we grab him he makes more calls and says he is very sorry the flight is closed and too full, there is nothing he can do, so he sends us to LAN ticket sales and says we’ll need to reschedule for tomorrow. So we go over there and they say it’s going to be $20 to switch our flight for tomorrow morning. Now we’re wondering what we should do because it would be cheaper to just hop on an overnight bus rather than having to find a place to stay an extra night. So we call up our coordinator and we tell him what’s up (we forget to mention that we showed up half an hour before our flight) and he’s pissed, he says we should demand that our accommodations be paid for.
So we go back to ticket sales and try and demand a hotel, going off the premise that they said they overbooked the flight anyway. They tell us to find the guy who said it was overbooked and it turns out he’s on break. Finally, a nice attendant notices we are obviously at a loss and clueless as to what to do. He asks if we have any problems and we explain how we missed our flight to Copiapo because it was overbooked and now we’re trying to get things straightened out. Erin drops Ministry of Education every third word hoping the government position will get us some respect and it seems to work. He says there’s room for one as the plane has been delayed over an hour and hasn’t taken off. We say “No! There are two of us; the ministry of Education bought us two tickets for this flight.” All of sudden, like magic, two seats open up. They were *messing (insert stronger word) with us the whole time! They write up hand written boarding passes and give us a personal escort through priority security and we arrive at our gate three minutes before the scheduled delay. We made it back to Copiapo, “Gracias Dio!!” Moral of the story, don’t be an idiot gringa, they will try and take advantage of you if you allow yourself to be taken advantage of. To them its fair game and it’s your fault you fell for it. It’s some sort of Chilean mentality dating back to colonial times when they were super oppressed and always trying to get a leg up on the Spaniards. Really the moral of the story is don’t arrive to your scheduled flight 30 minutes before takeoff. Give yourself at least an hour. Or two.
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