Wow. The title really does say it all… Today is the day. Our World Cup trip is coming to a close and we don’t know how to feel about that. It’s time to go back to “reality,” but before that we have quite the “day” lined up ahead of us. So, we should start!

So we woke up, got our things ready, went out to get a few steps, and then it was time to get going. The only record we have of our little outing is the below public art. Had to make sure to take the last picture of a nice mural.

But with that it was time to get going. We got up too slowly to allow ourselves to use public transit… so instead we decided to get an Uber. Well, that by itself was challenging. We tried for quite a while without luck. Drivers would accept, and then two seconds later they would cancel. We couldn’t understand why… and time was ticking. We started to consider getting an actual taxi until we were finally picked up by an Uber. Off we go!

Well… the Uber driver told us why others didn’t accept our drive request. It wasn’t because it was too cheap… it was because Uber is not allowed to go to the airport. Crazy! Our driver explained that there are sometimes police checkpoints approaching the airport to make sure that no Uber drivers approach. Well.. we had zero clue. And as we approached the airport our driver asked us to pay beforehand so that no money would be exchanged at the airport. He then took his phone down off of the dashboard, just in case. And the “just in case” was correct. As we approached there was indeed a checkpoint, but they were already busy with another car so we just went straight through. We had no idea, but now you know to maybe avoid Uber to the airport in Santiago. But, here we are!

We get in and have to immediately cross security. The line is long and a little slow… the time just ticks on by and my travel partner starts to wonder if he should ask people to let us pass through. He says nothing, of course, haha. Eventually we make it up to security and into the waiting area. My travel partner immediately goes to check our gate… and we have a little time. What do we do? Walk around of course! Haha. We imagine that you already knew the answer to this. Time to take the customary touristy photographs, haha.

As you can see, the variety of Chile’s geography is celebrated above. Since Chile is a very long and skinny country, it has a little bit of everything. But, I had to choose to stand right in the middle close to the Moai from Rapa Nui. And, that also leads us to the next thing we saw close to our gate; the writing/symbols of the indigenous people of Rapa Nui. Very cool.

But that’s all we did. We got a few souvenirs, but really just walked around our area of the airport because our plane was about to leave. Only really time for these two quick pictures close to our gate.

And then it was time to bring our time in Chile to an end. We said goodbye to the warm weather and got onto the plane. Luckily my travel partner had gotten us a window seat! We know that it’s a big debate about whether the window or aisle seat is the best… but we always choose window. We sat down and got comfortable for our takeoff. Goodbye Chile!!

And this is why we wanted to get a window seat. As soon as we take off from Santiago you can start to see what is called the pre-cordillera, the “mountain” range before the Andes. We put “mountain” in quotation marks because for many countries around the world these would be considered full on mountains…

… but that’s not really the case in Chile where the “actual” mountains aren’t far behind, haha. And this is the point in the flight that we stopped looking at the pre-cordillera and started to only really look at the Andes. Do you remember this from our trip into Chile from Buenos Aires? We love that the mountains are high enough to still have a little snow at the end of the Chilean summer!

And then you see it. We’ve talked about how the pre-cordillera “mountains” aren’t really considered mountains next to the rest of the Andes… but even the Andes look small compared to the Aconcagua. From the airplane’s map we are pretty sure that off in the distance we see Mount Aconcagua. It is the tallest mountain in South America, and the tallest mountain outside of Asia. Now, if you know that these will be your views you may also pick the window seat, hehe.

But the high mountains and arid landscape quickly change once we cross the Andes. We suddenly start to see more and more greenery as we move further away from Chile. However, eventually the greenery gives way to a concrete jungle. There are houses all over the place and then we suddenly start seeing massive sky scrapers. We must be passing over somewhere huge!

And of course we are. We have now landed in rainy Sao Paulo in Brazil! Welcome! Haha. This is our second time in Sao Paulo, with the first coming during the 2014 World Cup. Are you getting a sense of our trips preferences? Hehe. We land and it’s raining quite a bit. That spells bad news for us because we have quite a bit of time to wait in Sao Paulo and we wanted to go outside…. That sucks….

But! You never know until you try, right? So we get off the plane and make our way to customs. They look at us a bit weird when they ask us how long we will stay in the country for and we tell them “until tonight,” haha. But then they understand that we just want to go outside to stretch a bit. We’re outside in no time, and luckily for us the rain holds off!

Now… we have zero plan. We don’t have any clue on what to do once we’re outside. We thought that maybe there was a city closer to us and we could go get something to eat, but that’s not the case. We see where all the airport employees are walking toward… but that doesn’t seem to be a good idea for us. Instead we just take a walk around the outside of the airport. How many security guards must have watched us on their cameras as we randomly walked around a major international airport and took the below selfies? We imagine that the number is too high to count, haha.

If you’re familiar with the airport you can see that we actually walked quite a bit. Not a bad idea if you don’t have anything else to do, ha. And you can see that we waited quite a while since we watched the sunset and everything. Although it was pouring rain when we landed, the rain held off the entire time we walked around the airport. Quite lucky!

But it’s starting to get dark, which means our trip must continue! But before going back inside we thought we would share this nice thought that we saw written on the walls outside of the airport. “Some day the distance will die of jealousy seeing us together,” very cute. We don’t know if you do this from time to time, but we imagined an entire life for the P&J that signed their names here. What else are we to do with so much time to kill? Haha.

But we enter the airport, look around the stores before security, and then clear security quickly. Here we still have quite a bit of time to walk around and browse the stores and we do exactly that.

My travel partner decides that we can walk between terminals while we wait, so we get an overview of the entire Guarulhos International Airport, haha. While we walk around my travel partner pretends he’s Brazilian by practicing his Portuguese and buying a guarana drink among a few other little things. Eventually though he starts to get a little tired and heads towards our gate to sit and wait for our flight.

After spending 6 hours in Sao Paulo we’re called to start boarding our plane. We get taken to it in a bus and then we all start climbing up. Luckily we have another window seat! Good night from somewhere above Brazil!!

After a few hours, a few meals, and a few movies we finally wake up and see the sun rising over who knows where, haha. All we know is that we are now out of South America. And you can really see that the weather is much, MUCH different now. Remember those beautiful blue skies in Chile? Even with the rain in Brazil it was more like the sunrise above than the grey of below, haha. But, what else can we expect when we’re landing in Boston in the middle of March? Ha. Welcome to Boston!

Here we “only” have two and a half hours to wait, so we can’t go far. But you can imagine that my travel partner still kind of took that as a challenge, haha. Especially since when you arrive to the United States of America they force you to do customs and “enter” the USA by clearing security. So, naturally, that means we have to walk around a little bit, haha. If we hadn’t cleared security already we would have just stayed inside of the terminal, haha.

But, we had to physically stay inside anyway because outside seemed gross. It’s cold and wet… we’re not used to that, haha. So instead we just stood around and looked at the above kinetic statue to see how some balls moved around this contraption. There were also a few children looking at it as well, haha. We had one eye on this and one eye on the time to make sure we gave ourselves enough time to make it back through security. But, we didn’t need to stress too much because we got through security quickly.

Again, my travel partner went and found our gate, made sure that we still had time, then walked a bit around the terminal. We found some cool basketball memorabilia below, but, we guess that Boston doesn’t have a football (soccer) team? We found basketball, baseball, hockey, American football, and Boston Marathon memorabilia… but no “soccer” memorabilia… hmmm….

We didn’t have too much time to worry about it, haha. We had to quickly make our way back onto our plane to start the final leg of our journey. By this point we had started our journey yesterday at 10:30 am and it is now 10:30 am again. But that’s fine, we get on the plane, get our window seat, and get ready for yet another flight. What isn’t fine is that we quickly start seeing something out of our window seat…

Snow. We hadn’t seen this yet this year… Imagine, we had spent the last few months in the Middle East and Chile. We’re coming from Santiago at around 30°C every day… to snow…

Although I am smiling in this picture… it is very, very cold. And neither of us were prepared for the snow. But, it is what it is. We have no option but to quickly get used to the cold and snow again. Like you can see below, there is a lot of it! Haha.

But that brings these past three months of our “World Cup 2022 Trip” to an end! Thanks for keeping us company as we managed to step in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America in a “single” trip. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!