Last weekend we continued our discovery tour of Santiago - the urban jungle, that has been our home since 10/2010. Yes, one year already! And we still don't have a clue about so many places here...
So last Sunday we went to discover Parque Quinta Normal, one of the city's oldest parks. People say, it was similar to New York's Hyde Park, but when we went, half of the area was under construction, and the other half looked like a crowded spotty lawn rather than Hyde Park. Still there were some nice surprises: Santiago's railway museum is located inside the park. The museum has lots of antique German machinery on display, that I'd associate with the industrial age 150 years ago. Only here in Chile these ancient locomotives were used right up to 1981! Nowadays most cargo transport is done by road, they just have the bigger lobby.

After the Museo Ferorviario we were searching for the nearest park exit and found this: El Santuario de la Virgen de Lourdes. It is a copy of the famous grotto-church Lourdes in France, and packed with believers. Apparently it works like this: Buy your sacred plastic bottle at the grotto-entrance, then fill it up with holy tap water from an artificial wall, then sit down, sip your holy water and listen to the open-air service. As anywhere in South America, people here are very religious. But that doesn't mean they cannot talk on their phones or eat popcorn during the holy mess, right?

Seeing our families was priceless.Thanks to Outotec's last-minute extension of our trip, I even got the chance to visit both my grandparents. Shortly thereafter one grandpa passed away, at the ripe old age of 85. So glad I still saw him.
We also visited Florian's brother for a day. His family just moved back to the Netherlands, after 8 years abroad. The plan was to have a comfy BBQ in the backyard of their lovely new house, but the weather put a spoke in our wheel. Once again! It seemed, the whole "summer" 2011 had been an endless sequence of rain. So in the end it was not too hard for us to leave Europe and return to Santiago, where it would be dry and sunny. Guaranteed.