Trip to La Serena

All the people from my Study Abroad Program took a 4 day trip to La Serena which is about a 6 hour bus ride north of Viña del Mar. We left on Thursday morning, but I of course had the unfortunate event of my alarm not working and waking up too late to catch the bus. I had to go to the bus station in the center of town to search for another way to get to La Serena. Luck had it that not 5 minutes after I arrived, a bus left for La Serena with me on it. Those sitting around me on the bus were all playing their music on their cellphone without any headphones. I arrived in La Serena after a comfortable 7 or so hours and took on the challenge of finding the hotel where the group was staying. Every person that I asked had completely different derections for me basically pointing to opposite sides of the city which made choosing the right directions quite difficult. I ran into a concert going on in the middle of the city with a line stretched 4 blocks of people waiting to get in. After finally finding where the bus stop was, I took a micro to where the hotel was. Once I finally arrived, I was greeted with the smell of asado (BBQ) and wine.

The next day, we took a bus into the city to see the sights and what was going on. We came to the city center which is a square with a large fountain in the center. Many school children stood around in the park talking with friends while other couples took up the benched showing quite public their PDA's (Public Displays of Affection). We checked out a Japanese Garden which seemed strange in the middle of a smaller Chilean town. And of course the day was not complete without an empanada of seafood. In the afternoon, we took a 2 hour trip north of La Serana to a smaller town called Vicuña where we went to a well known observatory situated on the side of a mountain far from light pollution of the city. We had the opportunity to look through high powered telescopes at developing stars, far away galaxies, exploding stars, and planets. The coolest part was to get to see Saturn where you could actually see the rings. It's wasn't just a spot of light, you could make out the form of planet and everything. After looking at the stars, the group of men that seemed to be pretty knwoledgeable about star watching and allowed us to use the telescopes, then stangely brought us downstairs for a musical show of their band. Afterwards, they tried to sell us their CD which seemed quite strange to me that the scientests just happened to make up a band too and were selling their CD.

On Saturday, we took a bus the 1.5 hours from La Serena back to Vicuña to go to a restaurant that has no electricity. They make all their food using ovens that are only heated by the sun. In the afternoon we went to a factory where they make pisco which is the rum of Chile and Perú. In the night, we celebrated the birthday of one of the girls in our study abroad program.

We headed home on Sunday.