La Serena

The last Tufts trip of the semester took us 8 hours north to La Serena. On Friday we took the bus, stopped in a small beach town for lunch, and then bused another 4 hours to reach La Serena. We had free time to hang out on the beach but it was a little cold so not very many people went swimming.

Saturday we had to visit the routine small plaza, church, and cemetery. Seriously, every Tufts trip has included these 3 boring visits. We also visited an artist, a solar oven based restaurant, and a dam before arriving at lunch (always the highlight!) at Pisco Elqui. We ate a great lunch on a patio at the pisco distillery and then toured the facilities. Pisco is distilled from wine and mostly used for Pisco Sours. The best part of the tour was drinking Pisco Sours and watching and extremely cheesy film about a grape's life as it was turned into Pisco. Afterwards we visited Mistral's tomb (another necessary part of a Tufts trip: dead poets) and then drove to another small town. At night we went up to an observatory on top of a hill because the night sky in La Serena is the clearest in the whole world. We got to look through top-notch telescopes and were able to see Jupiter with 2 rings and 3 moons as well as stars that appeared to be single stars but were really 100s of stars in a cluster. The observatory was like elementary school science class on steroids!

We spent most of Sunday on the bus but we stopped in a beach town for lunch. We had shrimp empanadas, fish, rice, ice cream, and fruit juices, which would have been great except for the 9 people that ended up with food poisoning. I would like to thank my stomach for not succumbing!!