Back to reality(ish)

¡hola!

Well, as the title suggests, it was back to work for us after our week off celebrating dieciocho. The reality part, not so much - everyday brings something new and sometimes things are still very surreal. However, I'm definately feeling more settled and a routine is beginning to form. 

In the week beginning the 24th September, it was back into lessons straight from the onset. We are being trusted more and more with preparing and running activities in the classes too which makes the whole experience much more fun (though it still takes us a ridiculously long time to plan anything!). 

Friday 28th, was of-course, my 'cumpleaños' on which I was thoroughly spoiled by everyone. It was a really amazing day with lots of cakes, and hugs and singing and the fact that we didn't have to work made it even better ;) The weekend was a relaxed one and then on Monday, my birthday was celebrated with the girls in the Internado. 

It was a complete suprise for me, but the girls had prepared a lot of food (annoyingly we'd already eaten, but we did our best!) and sung to both me and Tia Glenis, who's birthday it was too. I thought it was really sweet at the time.. but then they bought out the eggs. 

Now, apparently this is some kind of Chilean tradition, but being a clueless gringita, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. They did it to Glenis first though, which gave me about 1 minutes warning of what was going to happen! Basically, they crack an egg over your head. I put up a fair fight and managed to avoid the majority of the egg as it was cracked, though they then proceeded to scoop it off the floor and smear it into my hair with their hands! which I'm not sure was much better to be honest... They then (well meant I'm sure :S) decided to help me wash the egg out of my hair by pushing me into the shower - fully clothed, phone in pocket! I managed to escape fairly quickly and ran into our house for a proper shower before we went to aerobics, unlike poor Glenis, who was in there for a very long time!

Other exciting news is that we seem to have managed to enter ourselves into a dance competition in Novemeber, and so in our aerobics classes, we are currently learning the Charleston and will eventually have to perform it, feather boas and all in front of goodness knows how many people! I know I came on a gap year to have new experiences and try new things, but I have to admit.. this wasn't quite what I had in mind. 

The rest of this week has been much less dramatic. Wednesday evening, we spent having a lovely asado-type meal to celebrate our Chilean abuela's cumpleaños. The meal was followed by the most amazing cake, which was pretty much layers of pastry and manjar, with chocolate on top - I mean, can't really go wrong there can you!? 

We have done a lot more teaching and today we got to teach our first class completely on our own, which was... terrifying. Not helped by the fact that the class we were teaching was changed pretty much last minute, so having prepared a basic lesson on colours for 1ro Basico, we were stuck in 3ro Basico instead, and so had a lesson which was probably pretty beneath them to be quite honest. But the kids were absolutely lovely and didn't seem to mind too much! Also, now we know how much they roughly know, next week's lesson should (hopefully) be a lot easier! We also have a lot of unused worksheets.. so if anyone wants any colour by numbers or wordsearches on colours - I have about 20 million going spare over here ;)

So that's another weeks work finally completed, if you don't count working with the girls in the internado tonight, which I swear is more exhausting than teaching most of the time! But there you go.. Next weekend we're venturing up to Santiago and Valpo which should be a nice, warm change, and a good excuse to see all the other vols too :)

¡hasta luego!

Hannah :)