The weekend! Oh wait, every day is a weekend for us... but on the weekend for everyone else, we decided to have a late start on saturday, and have a "night out". We walked to Cerro San Cristóbal which is a hill that rises about 300m above the city.

To reach the top, you can ride the Funicular (cable railway) or walk. We chose the former, purely for touristic value rather than laziness. Once at the top, other than a bunch of stalls selling cheap tourist crap, there is also a statue of the virgin mary and a spectacular view over the city and out to the Andes. Once again, however, the haze somewhat hindered the view so we will likely visit again.

We utilised our return ticket on the funicular to reach the bottom, and went to a restaurant that had been recommended by a tour guide for some typical chileno cuisine. I chose the Pastel de Choclo (corn pie) and Fergus chose the Chorrillana, chips covered in beef, onion and eggs mixed together. Next time, we might just order one dish to share, we barely ate half of each dish. Actually, we might just skip those dishes all together. Our enormous meals and a beer each pretty much wasted our budget for the day so we called it a night at around 8.30. Hard core. We're thinking now that anything mentioned in the Lonely Planet Guide has added it's inflation, as the prices mentioned in it for 2013 have already increased.

On Sunday we decided to visit Barrio Brasil (the Brasil Neighbourhood). After our short time in Sydney we quickly forgot what it was like for everything to be closed on a Sunday. Though it was refreshing to wander uncrowded streets, and this is a beautiful part of Santiago to just roam around. It was an upperclass suburb of Santiago in the 18th century, and while the area has been revived in recent years, it has avoided the large scale redevelopment of other parts of the city.

Remembering that Lollapalooza was on, we then ventured to that to see if we could hear anything from outside the gates. Unfortunately no one we knew was playing at that time and we couldn't hear much, but the people watching was fun for a while. Though with the lineup we really should have forked out the cash and spent the weekend there!!

LAPFWT