The Digs

I meant to capture the courtyard outside of my front door and accidentally captured this little girl in mid-sprint.

 My front gate.

My front door.

Inside: Another door, and a hallway.

To the left: what used to be a counter where they sold vouchers (I think the former native language English teacher, Natalie, was telling me they were for lunches?). In any case, the whole hallway was public. Which is awkward becaaaause...

This is the toilet. On the right. About 2 feet away from the counter. And accessible to anyone and everyone walking through this hallway. Thankfully, it is not public anymore.

The apparently American alarm system, located next to the inner door! It says "ALARM", "ARMED", and "TROUBLE". The trouble one is always blinking but nothing has come of it, so I guess that just means it's on? I hope?

 Next to the (literal) toilet closet, the (literal) bath room. Sink and shower stall:

Opposite the shower, laundry machine, water heater, drying rack, cupboard:

Hilarious mirror that shows me from the middle of my chin and up. So useful. The other mirror in the apartment is a little 8x8" mirror. Possibly my first big investment in Hungary will be a damn full-length mirror. Or I could just spend the whole year wingin' it? So many possibilities...

My Hungarian calendar! I'm going to be looking at December 2013's porcelain collection for a long... long... long long.... time...

Since this is the first time I have ever lived in a place where the whole apartment is mine, I decided that if I wanted to have a big old shoe pile next to my front door, then I WILL HAVE MY SHOE PILE. Also: microwave from the late Bronze Age and freezer-less fridge. The microwave works decently so whatever but the no freezer thing will take some actual meal planning. Blergh.

Toaster oven/electric burners. This is an... interesting machine. We're still getting acquainted.

Counter space, cupboard space. etc. Window door with colored sticky paper on it that makes it awfully pretty, like faux-stained glass.

Chair I will probably never sit in because I think it is just fuzzy fabric, wood, and cardboard.

Desk I will probably also not use very much. Maybe when I get farther into the school year. We'll see. I'm not a huge "sit at the desk and work" person.

View from the bedroom.

Bed, computer chair setup, other slightly larger chair constructed of the same materials that I will also probably never use, carpet, wall, endless piles of junk.

Not sure if the other pictures properly conveyed this, but I have crazy high ceilings. Perfect for inviting moth infestations (notice the stickie paper thing hanging from the light) and dueling spider clans.

Map of Hungary I bought for 100 Forint! (50ish cents)

View from my bed of all my storage space, which is empty right now and makes me feel like I have a serial killer's apartment. Probably going to need to start putting random things in there because I'm pretty sure even the display furniture in department stores are more decorated.

But at least the insides are full of things! ..... That Natalie left for me.

 I also have clothes. A lot of black ones, apparently.

Attempting to display the hilariously small nature of the only other mirror in my apartment, and instead took this stunning masterpiece of photography. In homage to Munch's "The Scream", I call it, "The Whimper".

Re: Zancudos, Jejenes, Pulgas, etcétera.

We're done here. Thanks for playing.

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.