After a pretty cruisey ride down to the nation's capital of Santiago we checked into our hostel, grabbed some food and called it a night. The following morning we checked out as we were meeting up with Lauren and Brendon again and had a reservation for a room for the four of us together. The whole city was booked out because of a few different events going on in the city. We arrived at our new hostel before Lauren and Brendon had arrived and so thought we'd check in a relax a bit before they arrived... Turns out this place didn't know how to operate their reservartion system and refused our reservation even though we had paid a deposit and had a confirmation number. So we waited next door at a cafe and when Lauren and Brendon arrived they were pissed to say the least and we had to resist the urge to go inside and let them know how we felt as they had basically left us out on the street! Luckily after a bit of searching we were able to get into a place down the road for not too bad of a price.

We spent that afternoon wandering around the city and talking about how awesome the weekend would be. We had bought tickets to the Lollapalooza festival which was two days of live bands from all over the world with Foo Fighters headlining on the Sunday. We had been looking forward to this weekend since we found out about it in Peru! We headed down to the site of the festival to pick up our tickets and got really amped for it to kick off. We spent that night looking for a decent place to eat and have a few drinks which, in the area we were staying in, turned out quite difficult. We ended up in a dirty dive of a restaurant which we regretted as soon as we saw our food. We had a few drinks that night but not too many as we wanted to be fresh for the festival and so called it a night.

We awoke excited for the festival but then came the spanner in the works... Brendon read on the internet that the year before that Lollapalooza was a "Dry Festival" (no alcohol). This distressed us immensely. We hadn't planned on a Bible Studies weekend and nowhere on the official website or tickets did it say that it was a dry festival! Luckily Lauren and Brendon have been to a few festivals in the past and so they had a great idea! We headed down to the supermarket and bought a bottle of rum and ziplock sandwich bags. An hour later and we were at the entrance to the festival with bags in our pants and girls bras! haha We walked through and to our suprise not a thing was searched, not even bags. And so we were in with a bottle of rum!

We had heard that 100,000 tickets were sold and judging by how many people were walking around, we definately belived it. We started off by checking out a Romanian pirate/gypsy band, Gogo Bordello which was really energetic and a fun way to start it off. The heat was almost unbearable and there was not a real lot of shade. We found some trees and grass and relaxed for a bit, trying to cool off and drank loads of water. Next we headed into the beautifully air conditioned Dome to check out a Dj called Pretty Lights. This was an amazing show and living up to his names, the light show was unreal.

Next up we checked out a new band called Crosses, with ex-Deftones leadsinger. It was a little disappointing but still fun. Then we sat on the edge of the crowd and listened to the Arctic Monkeys before finishing it off with the day's headlining act, Bjork. She lived up to her reputation and was a very weird and unusual woman. We found it to be good music but way too mellow and boring to be a headlining act at a festival like this and so we left halfway through. Her only slightly interesting aspect was the choir adding background to her boring show and silly dance moves. (I may be biased against her...) We called it a night after that as the bottle of rum didn't go too far between the four of us over the whole day and by the end it had just made us tired and sober.

The next day we weren't mucking around with the booze and took in a lot! A little more confident and some would say reckless, we hid a little in our clothes but just threw the rest in bags ready to walk them through. We arrived at the gates to find double the amount of security and definate body and bag checks. We were already stuck in a cattle herding fence when we realised this with no way but forward and so we just went for it. Kate was infront of me and when we reached the front the guards were busy searching through other people's bags and Kate slipped to the left and in between the guards who were oblivious to her sneaking right past them with me in tow. I have no idea how but we had just gotten inside with loads of alcohol and the guards had no idea. We met up with Loz and Brendon, who also got through unscathed, and we ran off into the crowd like little giddy school children.

We headed straight for the mainstage where Foster The People had just started. It was another amazing show with the lead singer running out into the crowd on the final song, Pumped Up Kicks. We also ran into a friend from back home and enjoyed the show with her and her friends also. After that ended we needed water as it was possibly even hotter than the day before. We found a ridiculous line up at the free water tank which was a common feature throughout the day.

We found some shade and relaxed while Kate and Loz found some Reiki tents where they enjoyed a couple of free sessions. Afterwards we split up with Loz and Dotes and Kate and I headed back into the air conditioned Dome to catch Crystal Method. I saw them 10 years ago at the Big Day Out and if possible they were even better now. Trying to catch up with Loz and Dotes after this was almost impossible and after an hour, whilst we were waiting for Joan Jett and the Blackbirds to kick off, we finally ran into them again. We enjoyed Joan Jett together which was cool, but not my kind of music.

We wanted to keep our spots at this stage as Foo Fighters would be performing there later. We hadn't eaten though and so we left Loz and Dotes to mind our spots... haha yeah right. We grabbed a bite to eat and went over to the other mainstage to catch a bit of MGMT. We caught a few of their big songs but as we were watching, half the crowd was walking past us and heading over to the other stage to get good spots for the Foo Fighters. This freaked me out a bit and so I dragged Kate, kicking and screaming away from MGMT, to try and get back to Loz and Dotes. This proved to be a fruitless effort as once we got to about 100m from the front, it became impossible to pass any further so we gave up any idea of reaching Loz and Dotes again.

An hour later, the Foo Fighters came on stage and we were imediately regretting where we had put ourselves. The next half an hour we spent trying not to get crushed whilst pushing our way out of the crowd. We finally found ourselves at a fence infront of the sound stage and tried jumping over only to be yelled at by a cameraman telling us to get out of his shot. We kindly told him to shut the hell up and then we were grabbed by an angry lady who thought we were trying to sneak into a restricted area and roughly pushed us out. We were pissed off but glad to be out of there.

We found our way to a nice spacious area at the back of the 100,000 person crowd where the stage was way off in the distance and you had to look at the big screen to see the band on stage. We had missed half an hour of the show but we weren't going to let that get to us and so we enjoyed the last 2 hours from there. We also enjoyed the booze which we had drunk throughout the day also so we were already a little tipsy. Over the next 2 hours we got quite toasty and the last hour or so of the show is a little hazy... The receptionist at our hostel the next day told us we were singing the loudest out of everyone, so at least we know we had fun! haha.

We had a fun walk back to the hostel and after a massive day we passed right out and woke again the next morning with massive hangovers. We spent the next day looking through photos and talking about how awesome the weekend was. We had an amazing time and it was hard to believe it was over, like the day after your birthday or Christmas. What made it worse was, Loz and Dotes left us that afternoon back to Canada. We said goodbye to them, a few tears were shed and once again we were left with just each other. We had dinner that night in the Main Plaza and spent the next day just relaxing and we found a beautiful vegetarian restaurant to have a nice dinner.

We didn't actually get to see a big amount of Santiago because of the festival, but from what we saw in busses and taxi's, there is definately a lot of nice areas and cool things to check out. Maybe another time...