Fun around Santiago

With school starting in just a few days, our next group of visitors, Carole, Christy, and Ashley, arrived from Chicago on Monday, the day after Sally and the gang left. It's a bit irritating to get to the airport and discover that the plane is two hours late, even though we checked the airline's website before leaving home, and it showed the plane on-time. This happened with Sally's flight, too. At least this time we knew better than to have breakfast at Gatsby's in the airport. Carole's flight finally arrived, and they all had their luggage, so we swooped them up and set off to the apartment. Since I needed to be at school for a meeting on Wednesday and the new school year was starting on Thursday, March 1st, we decided to stay in Santiago and do short excursions from the city. Roxy and Sarah were happy to finally be able to show some guests around their new city. The kids took a dip in the pool, had a tea party out on our balcony, and walked around our neighborhood. We took them to visit the girls' music school and the school where they would soon be going, to el Cerro Santa Lucía and then to the Mercado Central for a delicious seafood lunch. We toured the Palacio Municipal de Providencia, which was having an interesting display of armour, visited Pablo Neruda's house, La Chascona, and did some shopping in the Bellavista neighborhood.

The first day of school I only had one class to teach, a group of juniors. I was happy to see that my schedule had been reduced from the 38 hours I was teaching last semester to the 30 hours as stipulated by our contract. Then I was told that one of the 7th-grade classes had been cancelled due to the low number of students in that grade. So I got to school on Friday at the usual time, 7:30 a.m., even though I no longer had that first class. I figured I'd do some planning during those first two periods. Then one of the other teachers casually remarked to me that they had created another 8th-grade class, and it would be at the time of the previously-scheduled 7th-grade class. Of course I would be teaching this new course, and I wondered why no one had bothered to tell me about it. By now I'm used to this lack of information and communication, and I try not to let it bother me. Mostly, I was glad they had created another 8th-grade class, because now the classes were smaller and much more manageable. Instead of 45 students in a class, the classes are closer to 30.

My schedule is so much better than last semester! I actually have some free time during the day instead of teaching classes straight through from 7:45 until 2pm. Also, I'm done on Friday at 12:35, so after my last class on Friday, we jumped in the van and headed for the coast: to Valparaíso and Viña del Mar. In Valparaíso we stayed at the very comfortable Hotel Ultramar and ate dinner that first night at J Cruz, a quirky Valpo restaurant serving chorillana (a big mountain of pork, onion, fried egg and french fries) that everyone at the table eats from a common plate.

In the morning after a very good breakfast in the hotel we drove the narrow, winding roads of Cerro Bellavista until we found Pablo Neruda's house, La Sebastiana. The views of the city from the house are truly inspiring, and his collection of antique furniture and knick-knacks collected from around the world is intriguing. From there we walked around the dock before settling in at Bote Salvavidas for lunch. The food was good, (especially the desert!) and we were able to watch all the activity going on in the port. Before leaving for home, we made another stop - to the beach at Viña del Mar, where we relaxed on the sand, and Sarah and Ashley played in the water despite the cool temperature.

We had a really nice visit with our friends, and taking them to the airport on Sunday night was sad. Summer was truly over; I would be back in school again on Monday morning, and the girls were starting school on Wednesday.

Click here for more pictures from our excursions in and around Santiago: http://picasaweb.google.com/bdoody61/SantiagoExcursions