There's a nice theater around the corner from where I live. A Russian ballet company was coming to town to do "Don Quixote." Why not go?

We arrived with tickets in hand, gained entry, and hurried to the upper level to find our seats before the performance started in 2 minutes. Almost everyone else was seated. We showed our tickets to the person manning the aisle. He pointed us to aisle 10. We looked down the row at seats 7 and 9. People were sitting in them. In fact, the whole row's seats were taken. The culprit was a 40-something mother with her two young children. We squeezed down the aisle and then showed our tickets to the women sitting in our seats.

Chaos ensued. Rapid Spanish. People checking their tickets. Usher comes over and looks at our tickets, looks at hers, says random shit. People are moving around but people still in our tickets. The clock is ticking. We discover that the woman in our seats is not in her assigned seat — she was trying to sit in between her kids.

She denied the truth. We held firm. Everyone was looking at us. She then tried to grab our tickets to get a closer look. I said loudly to J., "Be careful of a bait and switch." Oldest fucking trick in the book. I took the tickets and held them arm's length from the short woman even as she grabbed for them.

We exited the row. The usher then said some stern words and the family left. We got our seats. Gringos: 1, Chileans: 0.

5 minutes into the performance, the woman behind me puts her hand on my shoulder and asks in a firm tone, in Spanish, "Can you move down a bit in your chair? I can't see anything." "Lo siento," I replied, "Soy alto." (Y fuerte.)

For Part 2 we sat in the way back in the farthest side aisle, where there were two empty seats, to be away from everyone else and so I could stretch my legs.

By the end of Part 2 my water bottle was expired and I needed more water, so I went home, while J. stayed for Part 3.

Just another day of ballet.

At the British Ambassador's residence in Santiago. Quite a crew came out, including local TV cameras. Here's the US Ambassador with British Ambassador:

Singing the national anthem:

We spent Wednesday through Saturday the other week in La Serena and Valle de Elqui in the north of Chile. We were debating whether to rent a car, bus or fly to La Serena. We drove a rental car six hours and so glad we did — it's a beautiful coastal part of Highway 5 north, unlike in the south where the highway is inland. Plenty of rest stops along the way to deal with both the call of nature and the call of hunger. It felt like Highway 1 in California.

La Serena and its beaches are popular in the summer. In the winter, not as much, so tourists were sparse. Fortunately, the sun was out. We had the beach all to ourselves!

The town itself is nice and sleepy. There's a big mall that we frequented twice for the ice cream store and bathrooms and awesome American music they play on the speakers. There's an all-you-can-eat Peruvian buffet restaurant along the beach that was unbelievably tasty, authentic, and, of course, all-you-can-eat, so hard to go wrong.

After two nights in La Serena, we drove to Valle de Elqui, a more rural region most famous for being where pisco is grown / produced. Beautiful scenery. Mountains like those of Colorado, canyons like those of Arizona. The tourist thing to do in Vicuña is star-gazing but (for the second time now for me) it was canceled at night due to fog. Still a cute, small town to witness, with a very different vibe from Santiago.

'Everyone talks about the south of Chile, but so far, I've enjoyed the north more.

Santiago is like San Francisco in that there are many close getaway locations for weekend adventures. There are also microclimates abound — in a couple hours you can be in snow or in beaches.

This past weekend J. and I hiked Cerro Pecho. We found this blog post and followed it all the way. Beautiful views, and noticeably cleaner air. Only hassle were the dogs. Unlike Atacama, there wasn't rape happening all around us, but they were loud with their barking…

[Wrote this offline and forgot to post it back in April]

There are three main tours to do in Atacama. Two of them leave very early in the morning to catch the sunrise, the other leaves in the afternoon. As a tour salesman began explaining the morning tours, we interrupted him: it's ok, we're not interested in waking up at 4 or 6 AM, regardless of what the tour actually involves. First, one sleeps. Then, one lives.

We signed up for the afternoon tour of Luna de Vieja. It was a delightful experience. Van picked us up, guide explained what we were going to do, we got out, and started walking across the desert landscape.

There were big drop points, Grand Canyon style, as well as white salt plains that inspire the name "moon."

We walked down a huge sand dune. We crawled through a cave. We trekked (gently) through canyons that resembled Bryce or Zion in Utah. The guide explained the different rock formations. I made small talk with a Canadian woman and a Mexican woman. We chatted with two Germans who denied that there was such a thing as a "German breakfast." As an American, I felt empowered to promptly correct them about their own culture. (Joke, joke.)

At the end, we drove to an area where we could rock-climb to the top of a canyon and watch the sun set. Quite a beautiful sight — desert for as long as the eye can see, with the sun setting behind a canyon in the distance. Our guide, who appeared to be dating one of the participants on the trip, turned on a Queen song and blasted it out of his iPod. Bizarre and at first unwelcome, I soon warmed to it as the soundtrack of the sunset moment, in the middle of a vast expanse in the remote part of northern Chile.