Ignao English Workshop

I didn't take too many pictures of my kids at Ignao because generally I didn't bother to drag around my 600 pound camera that was cutting edge once upon a time, somewhere around the Bronze Age. I occasionally took a photo here or there with my iPod Touch but really their quality was not great. In any case, here is one of my English workshops (after school club) that I did manage to capture.

We play a matching memory game, simple verbs and vocabulary with their pairs. The first round was verbs and the second round was vocab, and then we still had some spare time left so I asked them, what should we do? And these guys said, "Combine them all!" So we did, for an extreme final round. Also, I game them stickers when they won (we counted who had the most card pairs at the end of each round) but they were all really into it and I have a corazón de abuelita (heart of a little grandma) so in the end I gave them all stickers, which they promptly stuck right in the middle of their foreheads.

 Sunset while waiting for the bus to get home afterwards.

This was a pretty good day, one of the last I had in Lago Ranco.

Two Posts in One Day, Hey Girl Hey.

Some random odds and ends from various walks, day trips, hikes, etc. of late:

 Store I found in Osorno. They sell... lady things. Under my name! I'll take it.

Coffee. Real coffee. Clearly it loves me just as much as I love it. This particular cup came with a generous helping of whiskey. Hey! It was Friday, after all. But Cafe Rhenania, if you're ever in the Osorno way. Highly recommend. Very cute. Delicious pastries. Real coffee. Let me repeat. REAL MOTHERTRUCKING COFFEE.

Also from Friday, we had shortened class with the 8th grade (which I stuck around for, although they were just taking an exam. WOW is that boring to supervise.) because the school was celebrating the Police with an acto, or assembly! These kids pictured below were some of the ones who danced the Cueca, the national Chilean dance. There was also a really cute part that unfortunately I couldn't get up close enough to document, where the first graders reenacted little scenes, pretending to be criminals and carabineros (police). They had obviously memorized little scripts for their plays. Adorable!

 Small memorial tucked beside the highway on the walk home from my school. I've taken to walking home, because the time alone, listening to music, and just thinking and taking in the country is really great. Plus it saves me 500 Pesos (admittedly, not that much money, but I like saving money even when it's not a lot) and it's only 5K, all downhill. Every time I do it though, I get between 2 and 6 offers of a ride from driversby, often teachers at my school returning to Lago Ranco. My coteacher even asked me the other day, "Do you... not have enough money to get home?" When I told her no, I just preferred to walk, she seemed relieved if a little surprised.

Another picture from one of my walks. It was a cloudy day but you can kind of see the sunset reflecting off the sign.

Another view from my walks home. This view is directly across the street from the bus stop outside of Ignao school. It's almost comical how pretty it is.

My first English workshop! I basically have decided to run them similarly to my classes, although a little more relaxed, with a little less structure. We have the same amount of time as a regular class (theoretically, although not a single one of my classes has actually gone 45 minutes because the kids loooove to walk as slowly as physically possible and dawdle in every imaginable way on the way from their classroom to the one assigned to me). So mostly I just play a game with them. Last week we worked on numbers, and I had everyone count off starting from one and going to twenty. Anyone who got 10 or 20 had to sit down, and the last person standing won. It was kind of fun because the kids at first they were winning by getting to sit down, they didn't have to pay attention or keep counting but then... the last kid standing got a sticker! They paid A LOT more attention after that. After the warm-up game we played something that went over REALLY well, where I prepared slides with different numbers of things (butterflies, shoes, chairs, people, hamburgers, whatever) and gave each students a couple cards with the numbers one-twenty written out, in English. There were two teams and when I flashed the slide the first team whose member raised the correct number card got one point. If they could answer the question, "How many _______ are there?" with "There are # _______________" they got another point. They got pretty into it and we all had a pretty good time, so I consider it a success.

 Sunrise at the bus stop across from my street. Now that the clocks have turned back an hour, I probably won't even get this!! Sadness.

These are some of the views from Zach and my sunset walk up to Piedra Mesa from the other weekend. I didn't post them before for obvious reasons but they are really gorgeous and I wanted to share them eventually!

 Obvious scary movie trap- not falling for it. Nice try Piedra Mesa, I'm not that much of a dummy.

 Just so lovely. I'm going to make an effort to climb up there more often.

The next day, just rambling around in the countryside! Horses:

This is where the true adventure began. After hopping a fence onto what was clearly private property, we decided to push our luck even further and climb this (and several other) barbed wire fence to get up onto the hill we really wanted to be on. It was... an interesting afternoon!

 The view afterwards, when we'd returned to legal ground!

 On the boardwalk.

 Store I stumbled upon on Friday, in Río Bueno. I am kind of in love with Chile's love affair with The Cure. They were on the news for like 2 straight weeks before they played their concert in Santiago.

From this past weekend, getting some lunch at Las Vigas, the cute although not very efficient restaurant in my town. Sandy had accompanied my friends (Jennifer, Sarah, Zach) and I on our walk out along the lake, although we assumed we had lost her once we went to eat. But about 20 minutes into our meal she showed up, obviously pleased with herself for finding us once again and ready to curl up and wait for handouts! She really is one of my favorite street dogs in Lago Ranco.

 Another very cute street dog of Lago Ranco, who I call Street Sancho after my friend's dachshund.  A street dachshund! Who would have guessed! Lago Ranco actually seems to have a lot of pure-breed street dogs, I've also seen German Shepherds and various Spaniels.

So those are some things. I'm sure there are more to come, I have quite a lot of plans coming up for the next few weekends!

And the world will still be imperfect...

“Forever and ever, we say when we are young, or in our prayers. Twice, we say it do we not? For ever and ever... so that a thing may be for ever, a life or a love or a quest, and yet begin again, and be for ever just as before. And any ending that may seem to come is not truly an ending, but an illusion. For time does not die. Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in time.” 

I like that. It's a quote from one of my favorite series of books, The Dark is Rising Series, by Susan Cooper. She has a way with ideas and a style to match. She puts things very elegantly, I think.

My grandmother, Helen McClernan, passed away on Friday night.

No hay más palabras. I'm wishing for a lot of things right now, and I can't have any of them. So I'll just have to settle for some long, long walks, hopefully all of them with street dogs as friendly as this one to accompany me, until the wishes subside.

 Autumn is creeping up on Lago Ranco.

Cutie. He's got some hound in him for sure. A pack of dogs attacked him on the road when we'd walked pretty far out, but when I turned and ran in the other direction he followed me and thankfully, they did not. They hurt his leg a bit but he was okay after some snuggles and some more walking.

 When I sat down on the beach for a while, he kept me company.

 Playing with the iPod camera's filter settings.

 Cloudy but quiet day.

My grandmother and I were perhaps not as close as we should have or could have been, but I had a hell of a lot of respect for her, and I was always glad when I got the chance to see her and talk to her, even if only for a couple minutes. I'll miss her raspy laugh and her blunt frankness. I'll miss her support. She was just a good grandmom, and that's all there is left to say.

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.