Ups and Downs

It's been a strange, challenging week. Last weekend was extremely quiet for me, my host abuelita does not do much to celebrate Easter and the other family members didn't stop by too much (although Eralia's 14-year-old granddaughter Sofia did teach me an awesome variation on Rummy called Carioca that everyone who knows and loves me should be prepared to play by the time I return home!). It was nice to relax, maybe a little boring. On Sunday I took a long walk that yielded some pretty good moments:

 Three cows, all in a row. Piedra Mesa in the background.

 La medialuna, which is...

 The rodeo! Somehow I doubt I will be here for rodeo season (I'm guessing it coincides with tourist season), but still... interesting that it's just right up the street from me!

 Flower. Very pretty one. I was informed of the name but I can't remember it.

 Puppy Parade!!! And a very intensely orange-eyed mother who was not amused at all by my photographic efforts.

 PARE! PARE, I tell you!

 And then I walked along the beach all the way out to where I got into these woods where things got very quiet, and deserted. Slowly the woods thinned and disappeared and I was on a rocky point about a half a mile away from the pier, and the view was... Well, just look for yourself.

On Monday I discovered my slight head cold had gotten more serious, so I spent the day in bed watching Battlestar Galactica. Eralia even brought me breakfast and lunch in bed! So sweet!!

Egg, noodle, and cilantro soup. Pretty delicious.

She made me get up for once (tea and bread, the final meal of the day) though, she said I had rested enough. Sure enough, by Monday night I was feeling much better. On Tuesday I thought I could go to La Union to get my Chilean identity card, but it turns out it's not ready yet, so instead I headed into school to set up my own personal classroom! So exciting! Then I went into Río Bueno to meet up with some other volunteers, all good stuff.

 Pristine organization at the beginning of the day!

 The board!

Slightly rumpled but still relatively intact U, at the end of the day!

Wednesday was my first day in my own classroom. I had prepared my whiteboard, I had prepared my materials, I had prepared my plan, I had arranged my classroom; there was nothing left to do but teach. And so I did! I got through my lesson plan easily in all but one grade (I ran the same lesson with all 4 of the different high school grades because I wanted a nice, easy first lesson and because they are all about in the same place as far as speaking and listening to English goes, which is to say... beginners.), and that last grade only because their activity from the first half of class, with my co-teacher, ran over time. They were being assessed on the performances dialogues they had written, many of which the students had memorized! So well done there, even if I did have to pare my lesson down to an abbreviated 15 minutes on the fly. Now learn to say things without writing down the Chilean phonetic spelling underneath the English one, guys! We'll get there.

So my first day of classes went fairly well. Unfortunately then I had to wait around the school for two hours. We get done classes at 4 PM but we had a teacher's meeting at the school at 6 PM. Not really enough time to go home and return. The meeting was at the school, which has wi-fi, and I brought my computer, so it wasn't too big of a problem. I bought some sweet, sweet Coke Light and settled in for some Facebook browsing. I even did a little lesson plan research, and get some good ideas for upcoming themes we'll be working on.

And then, the meeting. It was entirely in Spanish, which I expected. I got a nice welcome from all the teachers (there was cake!!) which I did not expect but really appreciated, but then we had a PowerPoint presentation, first on the integration of special needs (because of psychological, home life, or educational reasons) students into Ignao School through a program called PIE. (That's my school's name, by the way, Ignao Técnico Liceo). I was extremely grateful for the PowerPoint wall of text in fact, as educational terminology has enough cognates with English educational terminology as to make it fairly easy to follow along. Turns out my reading Spanish skills are not quite as rusty as I had feared! However, I understood fairly little of what was being said as the Chilean accent has not yet become comprehensible to me. Again, we'll get there!

So, after this was another PowerPoint which presents each student that is being sent to Ignao under the auspices of this program, and why they are there. And the teachers all had questions and comments for each of them, oh yes they do. So. Many. Comments. We spent about 5ish minutes on each student, and there were two dozen of them. It went on... for a while.

For two and half hours, to be precise.

So when we finally got to go, although the meeting was at some points interesting, I was more than ready. But when I get home, a problem that had been simmering for a while finally hit a boiling point, so to speak. I am covered in bug bites. They are horrible, insanely itchy, at some points painful. On Tuesday night I got no sleep and by the time I got home from the meeting I could feel them, on my feet, my legs, my back, my stomach, my upper chest and up onto my throat, even a couple of my face... I could not ignore it anymore. So I called Alejandra, my co-teacher, and a lot of back and forth ensued, including her mother coming over to speak to me in Spanish so rapid it sent me over the emotional edge, and then a trip to the hospital. Although I think that's mostly because what other medical institution is going to be open at 11 PM on a Wednesday night in a small Chilean town? Thank God for it, though, because they gave me some steroids and some anti-histamines and I slept the sleep of babies. Stayed home yesterday, staying home today, taking another low-key weekend. Although if the bites keep coming, I'm going to have to figure out some other solution. Not right now though, because I've had enough excitement for one 24 hour period, thank you very much!

If you somehow magically managed to make it to end of this epic post, your reward is some seal pictures I took while I was in Valdivia. They reminded me greatly of this, one of my favorite internet thingies:

Fun fact I learned while Googling this image: Seal in German is Seehund, which translates literally back into English as Sea Dog. You're welcome.