I should probably start with last weekend when we went to Valdivia with some friends. The first day we actually went to a little village just outside of Valdivia called Niebla. It's by the coast and is just a really pretty little place. The ocean was really calm there and there wasn't a lot of wind... pretty much the opposite of Puerto Saavedra, which I have found out has the windiest shores of Chile. We walked along the beach for ages and ended up reaching the next village 20 kms away. It was really sunny and really nice. We found some blackberries to help us with the walk back.
On the second day we went into Valdivia and walked around the botanical garden. Found lots of stray dogs that followed us around all day. They were close friends by the end. We went to the Fluvial Market which is set up next to the river. It has vegetables on one side of the market and fish on the other. Sea lions swim up from the sea to eat the discarded fish parts. They're huge! Not nearly as pretty as the seals we saw in Valparaiso. We didn't really do too much more in Valdivia. We did run into two girls that we met in Puerto Iguazu in Argentina! The world is small.
we found llamas
Our weeks been pretty busy as Ingrid has been off work all week because she's ill. So we arrived on Monday with no idea that we were going to have to take all the lessons ourselves. Ingrid had left us a note with what to do with the classes but other than that we were left on our own. This was interesting. We're in a strange position at the school. We're not teachers but we're also not proper assistants. The kids sort of give us respect but are also a bit more relaxed (naughty). So we end up kind of being teachers and kind of being friends. Some of the classes were really good and listened to us and did the work (of course not all the kids do, but then they don't usually). Some of the classes were horrible. We've employed lots of songs to entertain the children. We know all the words to them all because we've heard them all so many times. Tuesday is our worst day of the week because all the classes are with older children. And the bad ones. The older kids don't listen as much and behave worse. So we left school very wearily on Tuesday, after hearing that there was a substitute English teacher starting the next day.
The new teacher is very friendly and a good teacher. She's nice because she lets us be a bit more involved in the class. It was a bit weird telling her how things went in the school and what we were doing with the kids. But the week did get a little easier with her around. Still we were very happy when the weekend arrived. I did enjoy getting that teacher experience. It's something we don't really have any more because we're not teaching in Vega Larga any more.
Yesterday we did some mega shopping and then went to capoeira. There's a new instructor who's really good and takes us through all the music and movements. He's also doing a good job of recruiting new people because the class was about twice as big as usual. It was a really good class yesterday.
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