Well, it seems that the rescue of "Los 33" has progressed quite well during the night, with no glitches. Excellent news, and yep, there is still some semblance of a fiesta going on in the Plaza, although very much tamed down from the initial euphoria. People have short attention spans these days…
The rescue progresses well during the day, and surprisingly, everyone turns up at work and has a reasonably productive day. By night time, there's only a few left and it's looking like the rescue will conclude tonight, much earlier than originally expected. Fabulous news on any number of accounts, not least because the hooting of car horns might cease one of these days! I'm sure that Chileno's have the loudest car horns in the universe.
As the recovery of the final few miners draws closer, I head down to the Plaza again to take in more of the experience. The excitement continues to build and whatever time it was (late, after midnight, I'm sure) when the final guy comes out, the place erupts. It's very emotional for all concerned, including several of the "vagabonds" lurking nearby, and one of them decides that he and I need to shake hands for a very long time, embrace briefly, and chat about how wonderful it all is. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't enjoy that one bit of spontaneous excitement – all I could think of was him lifting my wallet from me… When he finally left me alone, I patted all of my pockets to ensure that everything was still there. And of course, no problem.
I roamed the Plaza for a while afterwards, enjoying the celebrations and taking a few photo's, but I'm sleep deprived and need to hit the hay. Fortunately the crowd seem to be feeling the same and appear to be dispersing quite rapidly. I head for my apartment and climb into bed. As tired as I am (again – sounds like a stuck record, doesn't it), I struggle to get to sleep for a while due to those damn car horns. Yes, it's all very exciting, but really, do you STILL need to be doing laps around the Plaza and tooting constantly? I think NOT!
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