Fin de Semana in La Serena, day 1

This weekend Annie, Tyesha, another classmate - Jacqui - and I went to La Serena, a city that is about 475 km north of Santiago.  We took an overnight bus Friday night, leaving around 11:30 (after washing faces, brushing teeth, and putting on PJs, of course):

After a (relatively) comfortable bus ride, we got to La Serena around 5:30am.  Our hostel was awesome and let us go to sleep for a few hours in the room that we were taking Saturday night.  They also arranged our tours for the day: to the Elqui Valley (home of Pisco, Chile's brandy) and the observatory Mamalluca. 

In the morning (as opposed to the hours around dawn!) we re-awoke and hopped onto a tour to the Elqui Valley.  Having booked it through our hostel at 6 in the morning, we had no clue what we were in store for, but it turned out to be awesome!  The drive East from La Serena into the Valley demonstrated once again how gorgeous the Chilean countryside is.

The region is well-known for its agriculture because of the great climate and mineral-rich soil in the region.  In fact, the area typically yields 3 harvests a year, which our tour guide insinuated was really good and sounds pretty impressive to me.  They grow lots of strawberries, avocados, lettuce, spinach, artichokes and GRAPES... table grapes, wine grapes and pisco grapes.  All of the produce I've had while here - especially the strawberries - here have been ridiculously good so this region is doing something right. According to Annie, the produce goddess, Chile's grapes are the best and are one of the reasons we ended up coming to Santiago to study.  The only problem: Chile's table grapes are solely for export! Annie was relegated to staring at the grapes from our car:

Needless to say, Grapes are an incredibly important export for Chile.  We learned how to tell the difference between vines for the various types of grapes, and also learned how the farmers manipulate the sugar content for various markets (Germans like their grapes less sweet than other markets) by using light shields, like the white one seen below which will reflect light, as opposed to a dark net which will concentrate light (and therefore sugar) in the grapes.

These nets are shielding the delicate crops from the strong valley wind:

On the tour we also went to:

• The Puclaro Dam, which had this really cool art installation (the horns of this Toro were also a harp, being played by the wind):

• The city of Vicuna, birthplace of Chilean poet Gabriella Mistral.  As the first Latin American, and only Latina, to win the Nobel Prize, she's quite a hero and her likeness is everywhere.  For example, in the town fountain (creepy? yes.):

• The town of Pisco, re-named by a former Chilean President so that Chile would also have a claim on Pisco (there is a rivalry over this brandy between Peru and Chile).  The town is adorable and we went to a gorgeous place to have some pisco in Pisco.  It had tons of old world charm (but new world amenities!), just look at this picture:
  

• Lunch at a typical Chilean place, where they use Hornos del Sol (solar ovens):
  

• A Pisco distillery:

• And plenty of places to take in spectacular views of the valley
  

That evening we went out to the Mamalluca observatory.  For a New Yorker, seeing the stars is a real treat, and the Elqui Valley boasts some of the clearest night skies in the world, so there are a bunch of scientific observatories dedicated to astromony.  There are also a few dedicated to tourists, and Mamalluca is the most famous of these.  We saw Jupiter so clearly through their telescope that we could see its rings, and its two planets (did you know that Jupiter is 300x the mass of the Earth?!).  I finally got to see the Southern Cross and even neighboring galaxies (the Magellanic Clouds) with my bare eyes!  Seeing the constellations, so many stars (new blue ones and old, almost-dying red ones) was awe-inspiring... I even teared up, dear Readers, thinking about our Creator and what else might be out there.  When you get the chance to do this, you should.
Our tour guide was an adorable and petite Chilean woman with a cute, high voice that was especially hysterical while she was showing us digital representations of the sun dying in a few millions years: "it is not fun to see how we will die, but that's it.  Here goes Mars... there goes Earth... oh, we died again."  It may not sound so funny, but it was.  Here are the pictures of Jupiter:

Stay tuned to hear all about Sunday in La Serena!