Meeting the carabineros de Chile

We ended up in the back of a police van today. Seriously...



It all started this morning. We had plans. Check out 2 organic markets, a vegan cafe and buy a few things... Easy, right?
We wrote down the addresses, looked them up in google maps (street and number) and then we checked http://www.transantiagoinforma.cl (a great website to work out which buses/tube to take and from where).

We left the building and the first problem arose. Our travel card did not have enough credit for both of us to go on the bus. No big deal, I asked a very friendly lady on the street where we could top up our card. She said "Well, you could go to the mall and top it up but it is a bit of a hassle... so... just go on the bus, don't worry about it, noone will say anything".

erm... we said thanks. We were debating the options and then we saw our bus arrive so we ran and got on board. Funnily enough noone cared one bit, noone asked for a ticket or anything... STRANGE!?

So we got off the bus... (nope, the police bit is not here yet!), we found the street we wanted, but funnily enough we seemed to be a few thousand numbers off. We thought, no problem, we are good at walking! We started walking and suddenly the street disappeared. We thought, how hard can it be, let's just keep going in the same direction, at some point, it will reappear (surely?)...

Except it did not. We went from being in a lovely place with lovely houses to all of a sudden being in a fenced off part of town that (let's just say) was not that nice.
We finally found a gap in the fence and went back to the nice houses bit. And found the street again but the numbers still made no sense so we decided to turn around and go back. Except the street had no other way back so we got kind of lost.

We bumped into a pack of dogs and asked a man with a 1.5m stick with some rusty nails on it and were starting to lose hope when a police van stopped us:

"Are you lost guys?!"
At this point I was very glad Christian's Spanish is not too quick yet because no doubt he would have answered "no way, we are not lost" ;o)
So I replied, "yes, we are"
They said "come on the van, we'll call you a taxi and get you to wherever you are going"

So the Carabineros de Chile were lovely, they asked a neighbour to call a cab, they gave a lift to the cab place and made sure the taxi driver got us to the right place!

Gracias! :o)

Lesson learnt - do not input street numbers in google maps, it can find the street but not so much the number!