Flight home pt 2

Arrived in Auckland and disembarked for around 2 hours.  Came time to re board and there is someone else in our seats. Excuse me hostie, we don't appear to have a seat. Hostie disappears with our tickets, leaving us standing around in a full plane like stale bottles of urine. Finally she returns, beckons us to follow and we head to the rear end of the plane where this poor bugger was moved for the second time so that we had a seat together. We had flown quite a bit with LAN on this trip but they certainly blotted their copy book on this leg, even to the point of overbooking the flight. It does seem though that if you spoke Spanish and smiled nicely at the hostie you could get you and your mates in the four seats in front of us, all together. Unfortunately, I'm a bit old for the smiling nicely and I don't speak Spanish. I almost forgot, more drama whilst boarding. For reasons unknown, it is quite OK to take bottled water on the plane in Sydney and Auckland, but not in Santiago, where we were relieved of our two unopened bottles of water.  bastards! Anyway we arrived in Sydney, safe and reasonably well.