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A Collection of Short Stories
Two hearts, two countries, one love
Nov. 16, 2024
My visit to Santiago de Chile, Chile, got off on a sour note. Why? Because of Booking.com, or possibly more because of the manager/owner of an apartment I rented on Booking.com. Either way, neither of them responded to my support requests. On Booking I got a reservation confirmation, all good, great, I had an apartment for the price of a hotel room. But, the manager/owner never contacted me with the requisite info for obtaining the key(s). I contacted Booking support and they responded with the expected cut-n-paste auto-reply "We'll contact you within 24 hours". Sure they will, I thought. And guess what? They sent me the same auto-reply 24 hours later, by then the apartment reservation time was long gone and I spent the night in a hotel anyway.
Nov. 10, 2024
I arrived in Copiapó around 9pm and walked across town to a hostal I found on Google Maps - Hostal Plaza Carrera. At the hostal, the woman who answered the door immediately asked, "Did you talk to the owner?" I said no, explained I found the hostal on the map. She was obviously not happy. She called the owner, and a few minutes later gave me a room. As she wrote my details into her log book she was still unhappy. Maybe she had a bad day, I don't know, but she wasn't the most pleasant person to have greeting customers.
Nov. 7, 2024
This was my first visit to Antofagasta. This small city of around 400,000 people, is a coastal city with some beaches and a lot of rocky coast. And the waves can get quite high. Apparently the beaches just south of town host some of the championship surfing competitions. Another note about the beaches here - they are all artificial, man-made. There are no natural beaches in Antofagasta.
The climate is pleasant, not hot by any means, but warm enough most afternoons for a t-shirt or light shirt and pretty much always long pants. At least during the summer months of November through January. The city is quite modern yet has many late-19th/early twentieth century buildings and houses. The amount of rain received here is miniscule - about 4.4 millimeters over the course of the year. Temperatures range from mid-high 50s in the winter months of June-July, and low 70s in the summer and spring months of December-March. It's said that Antofagasta is the world's driest city.
Oct. 29, 2024
In the process of renaming and compressing all the photos in my photo album, I'm also revisiting the many places I visited, this blog is about one of those places.
At the end of March, 2023, I visied Tocopilla, Chile. While I was there exploring the town I came across an interesting church. What was interesting about it? Well, first, Tocopilla is on the northern coast of Chile which is all Atacama Desert. The Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on earth. There are no trees here other than the ones people have planted. And the church I came across is made of wood, all wood. The church is called "The Temple of Our Lady del Carmen".
Oct. 2, 2024
I've started updating my photo album photo names, starting in the Perú album. And for whatever reason, I started at the end of the alphetically-ordered list of subalbums. Oh well. What this entails is this: opening the directory of photos, one at a time of course, in a program called GeoSetter. Then in combination with that I use Strava for my saved walking routes and Google Maps. The GeoSetter program uses OpenStreetMaps and I'm finding that sometimes the two map apps differ in street names for the same streets. So, why am I doing this? After all, it is taking a huge amount of time to locate the pictures on the maps and rename the files to the street location names.