LOLLAPALOOZA (and other adventures)

Traveling back in time: My friends Lizzy and Taylor and I decided to head over to a café after class last week. We wandered around town and I finally remembered my camera so I took a few pics of the street art. We then went into Cerro Florida and found this adorable little café that had brownies which do not exist here. (It turned out they weren't really brownies, they were chocolate muffins but that was close enough). We chatted for hours and it was wonderful...

Coming back to this week, this weekend was my first music festival EVER! It was the first time Lollapalooza ever left Chicago so it was this crazy mix of music from the US and Latin America...

But first: We went to Santiago as a class on Friday to check out Villa Grimaldi which was super super sad. It was a concentration camp but the Chilean military tore it all down to get rid of evidence of what they did so now it's a memorial park. Parts of it have been rebuilt to demonstrate what it was like while it was being used as a torture center. The craziest part was that the woman who organized our community service for us came with us (along with a bunch of other staff members). We figured she was just another chaperone but when we got there, our director introduced her as our guide for the day because she was one of the women that was detained there. Although I'm sure it was so hard for her to go back and talk about it, she said it really helped because the whole point of the memorial is to make sure what happened is never forgotten and by telling us about it, she was contributing to maintaing the memory.

Because we were already in Santiago, we just stayed Friday night and were then ready to Lolla. The weekend did have a hiccup or two considering the will-call line was 3 hours, I missed Edward Sharpe due to technical difficulties and couldn't watch Kayne because I had to jump on the bus home but the weekend was amazing!! Lots of music, sun and friends. 

Throughout all of the shows that were played, my personal line-up consisted of:

Saturday:

Steel Pulse

Anita Tijoux

Cypress Hill

Ben Harper

The National

The Killers

Sunday:

Mala Rodriguez

The Ganjas

311

Chico Trujillo

The Flaming Lips

Sublime with Rome

Thirty Seconds to Mars

Jane's Addiction

Overall, the weekend was amazing. I made it back to Valparaiso safely and I even think I did an ok job on my Chilean gold mining presentation this morning with my four hours of sleep.

Miss you all tons!