Thanks Jennifer and Alex!

We're heading back to Seattle tomorrow.  We've had a great time and would like to thank Jennifer and Alex for opening their home to us.

Muchas Gracias!!!

Tea Time!

After returning to La Serena we were invited to tea at Jennifer's uncle's home.

Tea is a tradition in Chile - usually in the evening (sometimes replacing any other meal).  Tea, coffee, panqueques (crepes), bread, creamed avocados, jelly, cheese, humitas (a corn concoction cooked in corn husks and similar to a very moist tamale without the meat filling), and ice cream.

A feast of a tea time!

Pisco Elque

After all the excitement of the wedding on Saturday we decided to take a vacation.

Jennifer had Monday and Tuesday off work - so we headed to the countryside.  Pisco Elque is a small town up the Elque Valley - a beautiful, arid, and rugged location just East of La Serena.  The bus took us there in a bit more than two hours and we had two days and nights of refreshing rest in a couple cabins in the small town.  Paula and I also took an astronomy tour up in the montains on Sunday night and viewed the southern stars through a 12 inch reflector telescope.  A nice switch from all the activity here in La Serena!

The obligatory photos:

Wedding Bells

The main purpose of our trip to La Serena was the marriage of our oldest daughter, Jennifer.  The blessed event took place yesterday and everything was a smashing success.

The garden setting was beautiful on a warm sunny summer day, the music fantastic, the food memorable, and the happy couple happy.

Photos to follow (the four of us are heading to Pisco Elqui for a couple days - back on Tuesday)...

ATM Blues

So Paula and I were in downtown La Serena (picking up the bridal bouquet for tomorrow's wedding) when we decided to pick up some extra pesos.  We stopped at an ATM machine in the entryway to a busy store, swiped the card and entered the top secret PIN number.  As I was then moving through the options to get to the peso withdrawal a woman stopped for a moment and whispered in Spanish to be careful that this machine is used to clone cards.  Cloning cards involves having a card reader secretly attached to the ATM to grab the card number during the transaction (and the PIN?) and having someone nearby that casually noticed what PIN you use.

Hmmm...

I canceled the transaction and we headed off to find a collectivo home.  Once at home I called the credit union in Seattle using my cellphone (it had enough money on it fortunately) and had the card canceled.  A drastic solution - but we can always get pesos using out daughter's card and then pay her back in Seattle.  So we're lucky.

The moral of the story - avoid on-street ATMs if there's an option for a more secure in-bank machine nearby...

For Liesl

Comments Fixed!

Blogspot's default condition for comments is to only show ones by "registered users" or something like that.  So if you posted a comment in the past and it didn't show up, that's why.  I've fixed it so that EVERYONE can now post comments.  Have at it.