Our first week in Chile has been.. hectic to say the least!
On Sunday morning 21 of us stumbled off the plane in Santiago where we were met by our country rep Claire and taken to the hostel. Most of the Santiago lot were collected by their families and the rest of us went to the deputy rep Andrew´s house for our first Chilean meal! (discovered that Chileans drink ALOT of tea so thats one less home comfort to miss! :) )
We spent the monday looking around the city etc like proper tourists :) including climbing to the top of Santa Lucia hill for a pretty awesome view over the city! It was actually pretty hot too.. so much for winter!!
On Monday night.. we caught the overnight bus (comfiest bus EVER) down to Temuco with relatively little drama, aside getting lost trying to find the bus in the first place and spraying the entire bus with a bottle of fizzy water I´d bought.. woops.
On arrival in Temuco we discovered that it most definately NOT hot down in the South. We stood in the freezing bus stop looking thorougly confused and lost until Luis, the deputy headteacher came to collect us.
Since we`ve been in CholChol we´ve met ALOT of people and been completely bombarded with constant Spanish. The Chilean greeting is a kiss on the cheek and after meeting all the teachers, all the girls in the internado and other people besides, I think I´ve probably kissed more people in this last week than I have in my entire life!
Our first meeting with John, the headmaster was pretty interesting - communication was limited and in the end we resorted to using google translate for most of the meeting
.
We were then taken to a huge house just outside the village where an English ex-missionary called Audrey lives. She was absolutely lovely and gave us a lot of advice about our year. She`s also donating a lot of things to us such a grill for making toast and also an old TV so that even when we`re in our flat we can be constantly listening to Spanish.
Our little house is very small, but very nice. We spent some time cleaning and decorating it and its beginning to feel a lot more like home. It is however SO cold here (being winter and all, along with the lack of central heating) and the gas heater we have is quickly becoming the best thing we own! :)
The school provides us with breakfast (bread), lunch (usually something with pasta or rice, and bread) and then dinner (again, something with pasta or rice, and bread). So generally, eating involves a lot of bread, and a lot of tea and coffee (without milk!).
The rest of the week we spent sorting out and decorating our little house, exploring the village, sitting in on some of the classes (English ones that is), helping out in the kinder part of the school with the 5 and 6 year olds, and helping making bread in the school kitchens.
The evenings we either spend with the girls in the internado, talking and listening to music or some nights we´ve been invited to various peoples houses for dinner which is always lovely and means we get to experience some proper Chilean home cooked cuisine, which so far has all been absolutely delicious!
Yesterday afternoon, once school had finished we got to go into Temuco and buy some of the essentials we had yet to get, including a phone. Luckily the daughter of one of the teachers came with us and speaks some English and so she was able to help us work out where we had to go and show us around the main part of the city which was pretty handy! - without her I genuinely think we would probably still be in Temuco now, if we´d have even got there in the first place!
We´re going for our first Chilean `Sunday Lunch` tomorrow at the house of one of the teachers which I´m already looking forward too!
The language is tough, but we´re already finding it easier to understand what people are talking about and are beginning to get a grip of basic answers to questions too. Hopefully we should start helping out in the classes more over the next few weeks and so attempting to control a class of Chilean kids will probably help us a lot on that front!
So yeah, an intense first week and its not looking like it´s going to get any more relaxing thats for sure! But its certainly been worth every second of fundraising and I`m so looking forward to the next year and all the amazing things I`m going to get to be a part of!
¡hasta luego!
Hannah xxx
