My whereabouts in the near future

I've had a nice relaxing day today. An adorable tiny puppy showed up outside our front door! My host sister and I couldn't help but go play with her for a good half hour (and bring her a little bit of food).  She took quite a liking to Francisca and stayed out there for several hours even after we had to come in for lunch.  Awwww

But I digress. Tomorrow morning (Saturday) I have a bus to the regional hub, and from there another bus to Valdivia (a city in the South I visited last month) for the night. Then Sunday we have a meeting for English camp in a town near Valdivia, called Panguipulli. Camp will start Monday morning, and it's an overnight camp so we'll be staying in the same dorm building as the campers! Not quite sure what kind of responsibilities that will mean for me and the other volunteers (four of us total, including one of my friends from Angol, Joe) but I'm excited for the camp! We'll be doing that all week, and one of the projects all the camps have to do is make a lip-dub video in English, so keep an eye out for that! Then I'll be getting back to Angol next Saturday, and relaxing here until my night bus leaves for Santiago late on Sunday night.  Monday I will fly with my friend Caroline and another volunteer (Jen) to Lima to begin our Peru trip! We'll spend a few days in Lima, fly to Cuzco, spend a few days there to get used to the altitude, then see Machu Picchu on Sunday the 28th! Then back to Cuzco, then back to Lima, then back to Santiago. The other two girls will then head back home to the U.S. but I will come back to Angol to start the second semester here!  So what I'm saying is, further blog posts will be MIA until August, while I'm out having the time of my life at camp and in Peru. But I'll be taking tons of pictures! Wish me luck! : ) 

End of the semester

Winter vacation is upon us! That means that most of the volunteers are leaving within the next few weeks. We had a goodbye dinner last week for our friend Dan, who left early (bye Dannnn). We were sad to see him go! The only ones of us staying for the next semester are one other volunteer here in Angol and one from about an hour away. Dan's host family made a little "Spanglish" corner in their kitchen, with flags and pictures of all of us to commemorate our many evenings there : )

Then this week was our last week of classes, just Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Since teachers had to have grades in by Tuesday, there hasn't been any new material in a while and this week especially we did nothing in class. Well, we did karaoke and watched movies and played Wii, but no class things. It was kind of fun though! I wanted to post a video of my segundos (sophomores) all getting into it when we were playing Just Dance, but it doesn't appear to be working. Just enjoy the image in your heads. 

Instead, here's one of my favorite students, who did his little English speech about me two weeks ago (from this same class of sophomores).  His English isn't the best but he cracks me up! 

My volunteer friends who are leaving had special goodbyes at their schools, but I can't stand the thought of saying bye to my students yet! Glad I get more time with them next semester.  So many of them have a ton of potential for English, but on top of that they're just so much fun to spend time with every day! 

Llama update

Some day last week, I'm walking out of our neighborhood on my way to school and some random guy is walking the other way. He stops with a big grin on his face to ask me, "hey, wanna see something extraordinary??" Now, I have never seen this man before, and normally this would be a red flag. But I cautiously ask "what is it?..." and he points to the house at the end of the row and says, "there's a llama in their front yard! the house on the corner! go see it!" so I laugh and head to the corner. Sure enough, there he is, inside someone's front gate, eating the grass under their window while a little girl is smooshed up against the glass watching his every move. How did he get in there?? I don't know but I want him to come to our house next! 

Great news!

I'm extending my program! I will be here with my host family, working at my same school, until the end of November.  We were finally given the option to apply for an extension last week, and I got the green light yesterday.  Such a relief that I don't have to chase down another job here, and I don't have to leave my students or my host family! Pretty damn happy about it : ) 

Soccer

So, at home in the U.S., most huge national sporting events would take place on a weekend, or at night, right? I'm thinking like basketball or football championship games.  Since those are national competitions, the timing always fits our American schedule conveniently. But here in Chile, and I guess most of the rest of the world, soccer is the #1 sporting event, always. And a good portion of soccer championships are international, such as the FIFA U-20 World Cup going on right now. Yeah, there's another world cup for players under 20. I didn't even know that existed until last week.  But anyway, it's in Turkey this year, meaning that the games are always broadcast mid-morning here, on weekdays. Which just so happens to also be the time when I am at work and students are at school. On Tuesday, when Chile played Croatia (we won 2-0!), my head teacher and I were with a freshman class that kept getting interrupted with exclamations from students who were not-so-sneakily listening to the game on the radio through their headphones.  Last week, when Chile played England (big game! we tied) we just went ahead and projected a live feed onto the white board, as did pretty much every other class at school, because nothing else would have gotten done anyway.  Thank God Chile has yet to lose a game, because that might make the rest of the teaching day difficult... But it's not over yet! There are 8 teams left, and we play Ghana on Sunday. Let's gooooo Chile!

Cousins in Chile!

This past weekend was a very busy weekend. It was my host sister's 13th birthday and my host grandparents' 55th anniversary, and I also got to meet up with my American cousin! It was a jam-family-packed three days. I spent a lot of time on Friday and Saturday nights with various extended host family groups, went to mass for the renewing of the vows, and enjoyed several delicious meals (of course). 

Then Sunday I took a bus to Chillán, a city about 3 hours north of Angol, to meet up with Jess. She has been backpacking through South America, and spent some time in Santiago so we thought it would be nice to meet up somewhere in between (and Chillán happened to be about halfway). That city is known for its beautiful ski slopes nearby, which I have heard are some of the best in Chile, but we didn't have time for skiing so we just thought we would walk around the city and catch up instead (we were only there for a day). We had picked out a cheap residencial (a scaled down hostel) I found online, and met up there Sunday night, but unfortunately it left much to be desired. The lady who ran it was very sweet though! She was more than happy to take our picture for us out front.

this place was quite the experience...

We couldn't find much open Sunday night, since it was an election day* and all places selling alcohol were closed (so, most restaurants). So we just grabbed a quick dinner at the only place we could find, and came back the next day to see the city center and stroll through the market and the shopping mall. It was actually a very nice market, with lots of little crafts and beautiful fruit stands outside. There was an indoor market as well, with your standard mountains of meat, but I have no pictures of those because I can't stand in front of those glass cases long enough for a photo...

wish I had asked what these are! 

and even after having been here four months, I still get excited when I see piles of perfect fruit like this

We spent a while scoping out lunch options and ended up back at a little kitchen in the market where we had seen people eating delicious-looking bean soup. It was all we had dreamed of and more! And we happened to sit down at a table across from a guy who turned out to speak perfect English, which was a nice surprise.  He was also kind enough to take our picture, with our beans.

After lunch we did a little shopping, including buying 3 kilos of apples, bananas, and oranges to divide between us.  Then unfortunately we had to go our separate ways: Jess, back to Santiago to go skiing the next day and then on to Argentina, and me back to Angol and my students! But it was such a nice day to spend with a familiar face from home.  Good luck with the rest of your trip, Jess! : ) 

*It was the presidential primary elections, and Bachelet (former president, center-left) and Longuiera (conservative) won the spots to run for the general election in November.