Mullets, puppet shows, and a pirate fortress

YO! Good luck to everyone that is heading back to work/school this week. We've been thinking about school starting back up around Chicago (and we can empathize with summer being over)!

It was a really nice day here, and so we took a walk to Cerro Santa Lucia, a hill in the middle of the city and a few miles from our apartment. It has historic buildings surrounded by gardens (very fortressy looking - part Olmsted and part Blackbeard the pirate) and incredible views in all directions. At the bottom before the walk up:





















Here's a picture from the top...















One of the monuments commemorated a period that Charles Darwin spent studying in Santiago and another was for Don Pedro de Valdivia (he gets credit for founding Santiago. If you feel like getting creeped out then click on the picture and you'll see that he's staring right at you...).




















Pretty hilarious that when we got to the top there was a photo shoot in progress for a ridiculous band - we were trying to guess which guy played what (after some deliberation over guitarist vs. singer our final guess was from left to right: drummer, bass player, singer, guitar):















Claire hanging out with the band (no doubt working on a North American/South American tour with them and Beardog. Aaron? Boj?)...















On the way back home we walked through a park that runs along the Mapocho River and were enthralled for a few minutes by a puppet show. It was a version of Little Red Riding Hood, and every time the wolf would come on stage and talk the crowd of kids would chant "Malo! Malo! Malo!"















Other stuff this week:

• The registration for our car officially went through this past Thursday, and so we were finally able to get a TAG (Chilean version of i-Pass), which is going to make driving, especially to work, exponentially easier. Pretty hilarious how excited we were to get it.

• Because they're so common and there are so many different styles, I've decided to begin documenting the different types of mullets people down here have. Here's one of the more common ones: the dreadlock mullet (there will be plenty more pics in the future - I don't know what took me so long to think of this but it didn't hit me that I should start logging these until the end of our walk today):

• After forgetting to bring shorts to basketball this Wednesday after work I had to run out and pick up a pair at a local store. Very short and also (oddly) very tapered. I didn't take any pictures. Sorry.

On the way back home we saw this poster for a cover band show this Friday with Journey and Guns-n-Roses tribute bands. I guess we know what we'll be doing on Friday (although we'll have to show up late. I honestly cannot think of anything worse than the Pink Floyd cover band that is opening.)...