Who knew?!

Disclaimer: Much of the Chile blogging is for journaling purposes, and to assure our family we are alright. J informed me after the last blog post that, "Three pictures doesn't cut it." Therefore, I know this could seem like a ridiculous amount of pictures, so feel free to breeze on by if you so choose!

Today we decided to go exploring Santiago. J basically had the day off until his concert tonight, so we hit the metro searching for a humongous park a few miles away. However, after getting off the metro at the appointed stop, we spotted a few potential parks.

We decided to hang a right and headed up a few dozen steps into what looked like a jungle-type forest. Quickly the forest disappeared, and having no real idea what we were headed towards, we took off up a slight hill, as seen below.

As we continued up the hill we were admiring various trees and foliage, thinking we had found the desired park. Aha, but then we saw these huge rocks off to our left and steep rock stairs leading up to some kind of old buildings- hmm...they look neat, let's take some pictures. Right...


As we kept moving up, there was a nice ledge overlooking western Santiago- more pics eh? Why not!

Farther up the hill, we came to the conclusion that this was definitely not the park we were in search of, but something much cooler. After asking a nice security guard to take a picture for us, (btw, you would think that security guards at places like this have probably taken lots of pictures before and would know that the best way to take a picture is not like this!, but we were grateful!) I asked him what was this place.


He informed us that this was the beginning of where Santiago was formed, on the mouth of a volcano, near 1840. The founders of Santiago built a fort and castle over looking the surrounding area. Who knew?! One of the founders, General Mackenna, and 5 of his children are buried in a tomb near the top of the structure, as shown below.


We could see what we thought was the rest of the fort up top, but appeared to be accessible only by narrow and uneven steps- more than we wanted to try with a stroller and baby. So I went up alone! There I found another grassy area and fountain.

At the top, which was actually much easier to reach than first expected, was a great view of the entire city, which I captured many views of, (as did J, who I convinced to go check it out by himself afterward) but we will spare you shots of every view of the city, taken twice!

C wanted to go dip into the fountain, as you can see the two of us in the bottom left corner of the following shot, but we made her wait to get home and go swimming in our pool on the roof, which was freezing cold, for the which reason she didn't want to swim at all.

Sidenote: Chileans are very loving people- not just in general, but very specifically in that everywhere you turn you see some young couple involved in an extremely passionate moment that they want to share with all around. Look at the top center of the shot, this is purposely taken from such a distance to keep it G rated. (Not really, but it's the only pic we have that shows this chilean love in the moment.) I even had to go up different sets of stairs to get around love happening on the steps.


After all, we did find the park- not nearly as cool as the volcano forts, but to make up for it, you get a shot of me mid-pull up. I got slightly higher, but can not honestly say that it was a full pull-up. Shucks!
So here is to discovering without a map, and following your gut to 'Turn right!'