FLEAS!!!!

Hey all! Well its been quite a week so far. On thursday four of us left for La Serena, a town up north. It has got to be one of the prettiest places i have been! The beaches go for miles and are surrounded by the Elqui valley. We arrived on Thurs and ended up walking down to the beach for a few hours. Then we bought food for dinner and cooked some amazing egg sandwiches. The next morning we slept in and headed to the beach for the WHOLE day. It was so beautiful out and we ended up going in the water. I felt like i was 9 again, playing in the sand and jumping the waves...good times. The next day we went on a tour from 8:30am to 2:30 am. We started in the Elqui valley...a GREEN GREEN GREEN valley surrounded by dessert and mountains. SO PRETTY. The main fruits produced are papaya and grapes so we ended up going to a vina where they produce wine and a papaya farm. The weather was incredible and our tour guide was great. That night we went to an observatory and saw the most AMAZING stares I have ever seen! We also saw a couple of planets through a telescope...really neat. The rest of the time we spent relaxing and cooking. Oh, and why is this titled FLEAS?! Well the hostal was infested and there were nights where i just wanted to crawl out of my skin because of all the bites i got. A little different than the hotels in the US huh?

So that leaves me with TODAY. Well its been quite a long one, we'll start at that. I got up and packed to get ready to leave for argentina. My housemate and I walked to the bus station and took out money. What was exciting about this was that I had forgotten my PIN number all week and finally remembered it so I could get money for the upcoming week and to pay my friends back for the past week. So everything is going fine until i get to the bus. So I take off my pack to put below and this large guy starts to help me. I tell him I can do it myself and I'd rather that he didn't touch my stuff. WELL there was a large women behind me and all the sudden I found myself trapped. I didn't realize what was going on, but thought something wasn't right when the guy took my hair to turn me around...the women then cut my wallet out of my bag and off they went. SO now i am without a passport, credit card, ID, cell phone, insurance card, and keys. After they robbed me some security guards called the cops...20 min. later htey arrived. They brought me back to the house and dropped me off. I was locked out for about 2 hours because I didn't have my keys. I went to the internet cafe to cancel my cards...they owners were really nice and helped me out a lot...I guess its little things like that which make up for all the mis fortunate things that happen. ANYWAYS, all day I filed a police report and now have to go to the embassy to get a new passport. Needless to say, its been a long one, but such is life.

I suppose that's all the excitment that has been happening around here. I miss you all and can't wait to see everyone in 3 MONTHS!! Love Cristina