The nice thing about visiting someone in their exotic home country is that you see lots of things you wouldn't otherwise.
This always ends up a bit surreal, however, since you outsource the planning to someone who knows what they're doing.
You see their best places, but since you didn't do any research or logistics to get there, you don't know what you're looking at.
This is basically how I ended up in Valparaiso, Chile.
My Chilean friend put me in the car, drove, parked and told me to get out.
'We're here,' she said.
'Where?' I said.
We wandered around, the native leading the interloper.
People stopped us and told us to put our cameras away.
'Chileans will steal them!' they said.
'Damn,' I told my friend. 'Chileans are hella racist against Chileans.'
She started introducing me as 'this gringo', possibly as punishment for this remark.
Neither of us knew anything about the city, so we recklessly speculated about all the buildings. This is where Spanish colonialists watched professional wrestling, we decided.
The rest of these buildings are all former locker rooms, obviously.
This is where they fed Christians to lions. That was the Spanish that did that, right?
'How come the power lines are all over the place like East Baltimore?' I asked my friend.
'So Chileans can charge all the electronics they steal from gringos,' she replied.
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