Monday, March 15, 2010

New roommates, Power outages and middle school

Sunday turned out to be a bit of a lazy day for me.  After waking up and hitting snooze on my alarm, I decided to stay in Santiago rather than going to Viña del Mar after all.  2 more people moved into the house, and they are both from Mexico City.  They are studying here in Santiago and only arrived here last week.  We were chatting and decided to do some grocery shopping and then hang out in Bellavista.  I found a churro cart with delicious churros (and they even make them with filling too) for much less than at the coffee shop I have gotten them at before, and it was cool talking about the places I had visited in Mexico that they knew.

As we were walking back home, I decided to swing by the hostel to catch up with friends while my roommates headed back home.  Then we had the power outage.  This happened as I was on the patio debating if there was a change with Daylight Savings Time or not with some other gringos.  We hung out on the patio and discussed conspiracy theories that we had heard about the earthquakes and things along those lines while some others still debated what time it actually was then.

After about 15 minutes later, the lights were back on at the hostel.  It was getting close to 10 (or 9 depending on who you asked), and since the lights were back on I thought it would be a good idea to head home. When I stepped outside, I realized that besides the hostel almost no one had electricity.  It was pitch dark, and apparently everyone else in Santiago had the same idea about going home.  The metro was shut down, and so lots of people were wandering the streets.  At my bus stop there were about 50 people waiting for a bus.  I decided to try and catch a taxi (since I would have to take 2 busses to get home).  A lot of other people had the same idea, but after about half an hour I finally got one.

I got home, and some of my roommates had candles lit and were listening to the radio.  I found my flashlight and found the extra candles I bought a few weeks ago, and an hour or so later we once again had electricity.  I didn´t follow the news close enough to understand why we lost power, but I know that most of the country was without power for a while.  If you want to read about it, here is a news article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8567910.stm

Today another teacher in the program and I got thrown into teaching classes on our own.  I am so grateful that there was two of us, as it made managing the students much easier.  We taught 6th and 7th grade students, and we practiced conversations, played some games, and listened to The Beatles.  After that we spent time planning the rest of our classes for the week, and hopefully after this week we will have a set schedule.

Something that is nice is that it turns out that I will have completed my work hours for the week in 4 days, and so I have a long weekend.  I´ve decided that Thursday evening I will head out to Mendoza to enjoy some steak, wine tours, and adventure sports.  It looks like I can go ziplining and moutainbiking, which I actually haven´t gotten to do in a long while.  I´m looking forward to it, especially since I was lazy this weekend.

No comments:

Post a Comment