6 things Chile does well!

It hasn't been the most interesting week since I last wrote, in fact it's probably the first time I've struggled to think of something interesting I've done or somewhere interesting I've been to write about! With classes winding right down (I think I taught about 4 hours last week...) all my student friends here right in the middle of exam season, I've been at home a lot, trying to get some work done on my year abroad project. The house population is also down one now, my English housemate Lauren left today to go back home for good. Best of luck Lauren, and I hope everything goes well! Now the only foreigner in my house, pretty good for language practice anyway. In the absence of anything interesting to write about, I decided I would write the first part of a two-part article for you. This post will be about 6 things that Chile does really well. And... yes, the second one will be about 6 things that Chile doesn't do so well (I'll save that one for another week when I don't have much going on). So here goes:

1) Slang - Chile is world famous for being a country that uses a hell of a lot of slang. When I was looking into year abroad destinations, I wanted to pick one that would really challenge my Spanish skills. Once you get over the different accent and the fact that all Chileans speak incredibly fast, you get the chance to try and figure out what on earth the words they use actually mean! Chileans will often form entire sentences using only slang and idioms without using even one word of standard Spanish. This has been great for me because I've had fun learning all the slang. At first I really tried hard not to use any of it, I was trying to keep my Spanish as 'clean' as possible, but about 2 months into my trip I found myself accidentally using all these slang words. I suppose when you live with young Chileans, work with Chileans and socialise with Chileans that all use those words it was bound to happen. 4 months in, I now have no problems understanding what the slang means and am always being ridiculed for using it too.

2) Transport (sometimes) - I say sometimes here because traffic in Concepción can sometimes get bad, particularly around 6-8pm, and the buses can be quite erratic with their schedule. However on the whole, the transport system here in Chile is pretty awesome. Since the country is so long and thin, it only really needs one main motorway going right the way down. You'd think that with one main route for travelling up and down the country there would be lots of congestion, but actually I've never been delayed travelling around from city to city. The best way to get around is by coach (confusingly called "buses" in Chilean Spanish...), they're really quick and efficient, leave regularly and at all hours and very comfortable. The main differences with the UK coaches being that the seats recline into half-beds or full-beds and are really comfy, and that they are insanely cheap compared to the UK (think going the equivalent of London to Newcastle for a fiver, but in a seat that turns into a bed!). 

3) Food and drink (with exceptions...) - Again, there are definitely exceptions to this rule (ones to include in the second part to this post), but in general the food in Chile is great. Chile is pretty well-known for having really good seafood, meat and wine, all of which I can confirm to be completely true. Chile also has a spirit which you're very unlikely to find in Europe, it's called "pisco". Pisco is a type of brandy that's used to make some popular cocktails and other drinks, but never ask a Chilean person where pisco comes from... The home of pisco is fiercely contested between Peru and Chile and each will tell you that their country is the home of pisco, to be honest it doesn't matter that much, but if you do come out here it'll save you getting into the middle of a spirit war. Another good thing about Chilean food is the traditional side of things, traditional Chilean food is great!Worth mentioning though that the average student diet is just as bad as in the UK.

4) Nature - This was bound to come up. Chile extends from the driest desert in the world up in the North, to glaciers in the South whilst passing through more temperate and jungle zones in the centre. The country is full of the most beautiful lakes, mountains, volcanoes and glaciers. Volcanoes are not something that I'm that used to as an Englishman. Two special experiences stand out in my mind to do with volcanoes. The first is when I went to Villarica in the south to spend the weekend there, I slept in the house of a friend of a friend who has an insane view of the volcano there (which erupted last year). At night I went out onto the decking to see the volcano in the pitch black and saw the glowing red haze above it, it only happens with some very active volcanoes and it was breathtaking. The other experience is less to do with volcanoes, but it did take place on a volcano. I was learning to ski on the Antuco volcano, I spent the night sleeping on the back of a pickup truck parked on the side of the volcano and I can say that I've never seen so many stars before, the sky was amazing. I was also told that since I'm in the Southern Hemisphere, they're not the same stars that any of you readers from the Northern Hemisphere will be seeing. I've only explored a small part of the country so far, and intend to take full advantage of the amazing place I'm in over the next 7 months.

5) Outdoor sports - You've already heard a lot from me about kayaking, and I've also mentioned time I've spent skiing, hiking, swimming and climbing. However, these aren't the only sports that Chile has to offer. Some would say that Chile is the best country in the world for outdoor sports enthusiasts. You've got skiing about two-thirds of the year, all year round surfing, world-class rivers, very technical glaciers, big big climbing routes, the list goes on. More so than in England, getting out in the fresh air and enjoying the outdoors seems to be a thing that families, couples and friends love to do together.

6) People - Ending on a bit of a soppy note here. Chilean people (apart from some pretty unfriendly commuters in Santiago) are extremely friendly and welcoming. You'll always be invited to go out and do things, to peoples houses, to go drinking or partying, to cook together, all sorts. A lot of English people have a kind of built-in suspicion of anybody who tries to do something nice for them, especially Londoners, but here in Chile it's completely normal. The main thing I would say with regards to thing is that you have to be a 'yes man' to make the most of this. I think that's probably just general year abroad advice really, you have to say yes to as much as you can, and you'll find yourself with loads of new mates and things to do right away.

So that's it, 6 things that Chile does really well. Wednesday I'll be moving South and hope to write another post on the weekend to let you all know how I'm settling into Pucón!

Summer plans :D

Classes are starting to wind down at INACAP now. The students are starting to have their tests and exams which I obviously don't have to go to, so my workload has been steadily easing off over the past week or so. In fact, next Monday will be my last day this term! I can't wait to finish this term, not that I haven't enjoyed teaching, it just means that I'll be able to enjoy the summer and make the most of not having to teach English every day.

This week gave me a few interesting opportunities to get out and about. The first was on Thursday when I was invited to go to yet another INACAP campus to judge a singing competition. Some of you may have read a previous blog post in which I spoke about 'INACAP's Got Talent', a singing competition in English that took place on the campus that I work at and I was one of the judges, helping judge accent and pronunciation. This competition was in Chillán, about an hour and a half to the north and was called 'I Rock'. It was the same kind of set up, kids from local colleges as well as INACAP students had to sing a rock song in English and we judged them.

This time there were four of us on the judging panel: a local radio DJ, a jazz singer. a guitarist and me. It was funny to see that yet again, the younger college kids sung way better than the INACAP students, and there was a good range of different songs. It seemed to be a bit more of a whole day event that the competition in Concepción, there were guest performers, costume competitions, English quizzes among other things. Overall it was pretty fun and it was nice to meet the English department from another campus. As a thank you gift (which I don't really feel like I deserved, having just written numbers on a sheet of paper for a few hours), I was given a bottle of Chilean wine. But I've got to say that it's possibly the strangest (good strange) bottle I've ever seen, being in the shape of a Chilean man...

On Friday I finally managed to get Roberto to come to the Laguna Chica with me where I taught him to kayak. He'd had one bad experience with kayaking before so he was a little bit nervous, but he took to it really quickly and now that the summer is here, it'll be great to have somebody to go paddling with.

Couldn't have picked a nicer day!

The company wasn't bad either...

I've now got a pretty good plan of what my summer is going to look like. I've got the whole of December, January and February off, so definitely have to make the most of it. Last weekend, I met up with Ben May, the owner of Kayak Chile who run kayak classes and trips in Pucón. He offered me work with them on a kind of internship basis for the whole of December and January. This means that in about 10 days I'll be packing up and moving to Pucón for two months, where I'll hopefully be paddling every day, whether it be messing around with friends on my days off, or teaching clients on flatwater and whitewater. I'm really excited to be able to work with a well-known company that I should be able to learn loads from. It'll also be a great chance for me to improve my technical Spanish vocab, since I'll probably be teaching about half of the courses in Spanish. After my time in Pucón I will be heading off to Ecuador with 3 paddling friends from the UK. I knew I wanted to do some kind of longer paddling trip whilst I'm out in South America, and this seemed the perfect opportunity to explore another country too. After a few weeks in Ecuador, I'll head back to Concepción for about a week before heading down South to Torres del Paine with my housemate Roberto to go trekking for 10 days. It's going to be a very busy, but hopefully amazing summer!!!

EARTHQUAKE!!!!!!!

Ok, so this is a slight exaggeration. Last Friday I experienced my first tremors in Concepción. The epicentre of that earthquake was in Curicó, and had a magnitude of 6.4 on the Richter scale. Curicó is about 300km from Conce, so we only felt a tiny shake here. It was a weird sensation, where the ground rumbles a little below your feet, but it only lasted about 10 seconds and was very weak. Little did I know that I'd experience a slightly more scary version a few days later. The tremors came up in conversation a few times that weekend since it had been a while since the Chileans here in Conce had felt any. Nobody could really come to a consensus about the right action in case of an earthquake, they all seem to have their own plans! I decided if I was ever in the house, I'd just follow my friend... At 1:50am on Monday I woke up kind of confused, the bed was shaking quite a lot, a lot more than Friday. I stood up and the ground was moving side to side beneath me. Being very tired I got back in my bed and decided to wait and see if it stopped, which after about 2 minutes it did. This was a slightly weaker 5.9 on the scale, but only 50km away this time so we felt it very strongly. Supposedly there were 6 aftershocks about every 45mins after the initial tremors, I managed to stay sound asleep through those! It's safe to say that it was a new experience and not one I'm too keen to repeat. It is strange just having to wait to see if everything stops and although neither experience was particularly scary, there is no way I'd want to be any closer to the epicenter! After a shaky start to the week (couldn't resist), I headed off to the capital of Chile, Santiago.

A world away from Conce

On my way to the hotel, the long long way.

As I mentioned in my last post, this week I was required to go to Santiago to provide support to the English debate team which I have been helping train this semester. It turned out to be a bit more faff than planned. My team flew to Santiago along with the main teacher and arrived the Tuesday night to have a restful night's sleep before the big competition. Meanwhile the lowly English assistant had to travel by nightbus, not the most enriching experience. I arrived in the captial at around 6:30am and made my way to the INACAP campus in Santiago. INACAP has lots of campuses around the country and this comptetion would see 6 teams from around the country come together to compete. When it got to 8:30am and there was still no sign of my team I got in touch.

"Where are you guys? I've been waiting in the auditorium for ages"
"We're in the auditorium, which campus are you on?"
"Ummmm, THE campus!?"
"No Shahid, there are about 5 campuses in Santiago"

Right... So turns out the campus of the competition was 11km from the campus I was at, great. It did give me a chance to try out Santiago's admittedly efficient metro system though! The day of debating went well and my team won 2 out of 2 debates. Then I looked up the address of my hotel, the guys organising my trip decided to try to reserve  hotel for me the day before my trip. They did a good job in the sense that my hotel was opposite INACAP, they didn't realise that it was yet another campus. This meant I spent an hour after the competition walking to my hotel, whilst my students got driven the short 10 minute trip to their hotel! Good job to whoever made that screw-up :)

INACAP Concepción on the left, hard at work

The finals took place on day 2, and despite their best efforts, the team lost both the debates and ended up in 3rd place. I'm very proud of them all and saw a big improvement throughout the competition, well done to Macarena, Fernanda, Jorge and Sara for a solid performance and giving it all you've got. One thing that surprised me was how petty some people can be. I'm not talking about the students here, the vast majority took the competition in good spirits and had a great time. The teachers however, from various campuses, got slightly too competitive and there was a lot of bitching and snide comments going on. We finished quite early and I headed off as soon as I could, to escape the now souring atmosphere, back into the centre of town to meet up with a friend. Another Cambridge languages student I know is working for this year doing a similar job to me but in Santiago. We went to a nice little cafe in an almost Parisian part of the city and had lunch and coffee. It was lovely to see somebody from back home. Hopefully we'll be able to meet up again, either in Conce or Santiago to show each other around our new hometowns!

Thanks for showing me around Claudia!

What to do with a long weekend

Having spent 9am-9pm on the WAFA course for three days, and one day finishing at midnight I was pretty shattered. As I explained before, this Tuesday was a public holiday so everybody got Monday off too. With a four day weekend to look forward to I headed off to my friend Roberto's family home, about 2hrs from Pucón, to relax for a while. We didn't really have a solid plan for the weekend, my only plan was to get a good night's sleep! Sunday morning we woke up around midday and headed off with our rucksacks full of overnight trekking and camping gear. Ironically, the plan was to head back to Pucón and get a local bus to somewhere to go exploring. As many of my journeys in Chile, this one also began by hitchhiking, or at least trying to. We spent over an hour walking along the side of the road waiting for someone to pick us up and finally someone offered to take us, he even gave us drinks and snacks in the car!

What a nice guy, saved us a loooong walk!

Arriving in Pucón, my two friends decided that we'd go to a place called Caburgua, about an hour from Pucón. Caburgua has two beaches, 'La playa negra' and 'La playa blanca', that border a really beautiful lake. We arrived at the beach at about 6pm when everybody was starting to leave, I was told that in the summer it's crazy busy but this day it wasn't too bad. We went and had a chat with the campsite owner, who had a small space for tents at the side of the lake, unfortunately for some reason he was trying to charge ridiculously expensive prices per person.I suggested we walk a bit further down the beach and try to find a discreet place to put up the tent. After quickly putting up the tent, we started a campfire and went swimming in the freezing lake, having the campfire ready to warm us up after the chilly swim was definitely a good shout.

Who wouldn't have enjoyed this?

It turned out to be a perfect couple of days on the beach, chilled beers from the lake, countless stars in a clear sky. food cooked over the fire and great company. Even the driving rain that soaked us on Sunday didn't put us off. Our friend Conzu headed home on Monday evening and Roberto and I spent Tuesday finishing off some studying before we took a night bus home. I always enjoy spending time away from home, meeting new people and exploring new places, so I was pretty happy with how I spent this long weekend.

Battered and bruised, but a good start

Returning back to normality at work this week was a bit of a drag, work is never as much fun as traveling. However, two things have made this week a little more interesting. Firstly, Roberto gave be various parts from old skateboards of his and we got round to putting them all together this week, so now he's been teaching me to skate which has been a laugh. Secondly, there was an earthquake that measured 6.5 on the Richter scale about 300km north of Conce. This meant that we felt the tremors in Concepción, the first that I've felt whilst I have been here. It's a weird feeling, the ground moving beneath your feet! The tremors felt in Concepción were pretty small and only lasted around 10 seconds, and given that all the buildings here are designed with earthquakes in mind, you can forget the traditional image of things falling off shelves and bridges collapsing, at least this time... This coming week I'll be heading to the capital city, Santiago, to accompany the English debate team that I have been training to an INACAP debate competition. They will be spending two days debating against students from other INACAP campuses in English, the topic being social media and its influence in society. The team is flying there, but poor me has to take yet another night bus of 6hrs to get there and a second one to get back. Hopefully I'll be able to update you all when we return with the trophy!

Wilderness Advanced First Aid Course

It's been nearly two weeks since I've last posted, mainly because it's been pretty hectic here. I'm going to split the time since my last post, the first talking about my time in Pucón and the second about the rest of the time. So here goes.

Pucón, with the volcano smoking away in the background.

From Tuesday 25th to Saturday 29th I was based in Pucón in the south of Chile, I decided to take an Advanced Wilderness First Aid course to better prepare me for various kayaking trips I'm planning here and to be able to work in Pucón over the summer. The course, WAFA for short, is a 40hr course designed for outdoor instructors to give them an advanced level of first aid training to be able to operate in remote areas safely. The main difference between wilderness and urban first aid is that in urban first aid you are likely to be supported by paramedics or clinical practitioners within an hour or two, whereas in the wilderness environment first-aiders may have to wait anywhere from hours to days till they get help and may have to evacuate patients themselves. For this reason, the course is designed to give participants more training in detailed patient assessment, prolonged patient care and evacuation. The reality in Chile is that in some places, help is quite far away and calling mountain rescue or a helicopter isn't free, in fact the minimum amount a patient will pay for helicopter support is over £1,500 so the guides out here often have to evacuate casualties themselves.

The idea is to use what you have and improvise

I travelled down to Pucón on Tuesday evening and we started at 9am on Wednesday, I was pleased to find out that all 18 of the participants were raft guides because this meant the course would be very specific to the whitewater environment. The majority of the first two days was spent in the classroom studying the theoretical side of physiology and medical emergencies as well as looking at in-depth primary and secondary surveys. We spent 9am-9pm on day 1 and 9am-5pm on day 2 on this stuff, and although boring, it's pretty vital stuff. Luckily I'd done first aid courses before and was familiar with most of the content so it wasn't too hard. At around 5pm on day 2 we started to look at some practical components of the course. We looked at immobilising spinal injuries, fractures and reducing dislocations. Something that I found very useful about the instructor's approach to the course was that all the material we used to immobilise these injuries was equipment we carry on the river. There's no point me learning to use a complicated leg splint when it won't fit in the back of my kayak, instead we used paddles, slings, rope and rollmats to complete the tasks. We also learnt how to build improvised stretchers which is something that would come in handy for practical scenarios across the next few days.

On day 3 we spent the morning looking at altitude sickness, shock and evacuation plans in the classroom, followed by a practical session on CPR and the use of airway adjuncts and defibrillators, safe to say that the CPR mannequins were the most stylish I've seen. After lunch we worked for a few hours on spinal cases. This was a complex topic because we had to learn how to immobilise patients, safely roll and lift patients, secure them to improvised backboards and evaluating the spinal column to rule out spinal injuries before evacuation. We then spent until 8pm practising with various scenarios, basically one of the participants being given a role and a medical history and the rest of us turning up to deal with what we found, we were confronted with around 20 different cases of medical cases, trauma and environmental cases. I really enjoyed the hands on stuff and found it kind of like problem-solving to figure out what was wrong with the patient in some cases, treat the issue and form an evacuation plan. Some of these scenarios also involved building the stretchers to evacuate the patient and moving the patients through tricky terrain.

Teamwork was imperative

Not sure how many babies I'll take kayaking, but good practice all the same

Using defibs and airway adjuncts

The coolest mannequins in Chile

Night rescue was challenging

At 8pm we were told to go and grab dinner and meet back at the centre at 9pm, mysterious... At 9pm we were told that the 18 of us were going to take part in a scenario, myself leading one team of 9 and another guy leading the other half. We spent half an hour gathering and organising our equipment and suddenly received a call on the emergency phone from a distressed and incoherent guy telling us he and a friend needed help on the beach, we couldn't get any more information from him. We headed off the beach and split up, my team went right and the other team left. The unfortunate thing was that the beach is very long, being pitch black we had to thoroughly search the beach and the forest that lined it. After 30mins of searching my team found the two casualties, a kilometre from the entry point. Both casualties we on the waters edge and soaked through, supposedly kayakers that had entered into difficulties. As team leader I quickly called for the other team's support and we evaluated the patients. One patient had an open head wound, penetration wound to the chest, no feeling in his legs (suggesting spinal injuries) and severe hypothermia, the other was also very cold and wet, had an open fracture to the leg and was in shock. The instructors were the scenario 'gods' and provided the information on things like pulse, temperature etc when we asked for it, I must say the situation was very realistic and since it was dark it was made even more realistic. We stabilised both patients with our improvised kayaking/rafting equipment and began the evacuation. Unfortunately for us it wasn't going to be that easy, both patients vomited multiple times (tricky to deal with when they're strapped on their backs to spine boards) and stopped breathing more times than I can count. In total, both teams did around 35mins of CPR in the freezing cold. We finally managed to reach the evacuation point and do a patient handover and debrief, at 12pm over 3hrs later... It was great to be able to practise a serious situation and we were told that the next day would hold even more scenarios, this time for our evaluations.

The final day was almost all practical based, it was also evaluation day and we had to do our practical and written exams. My practical scenario was hard to believe when I reached the scene. The instructors had put a victim underneath a bus, face down and screaming in pain. There was almost no space under the bus and rolling the victim over and extracting here, all whilst trying to keep her spine immobilised was a difficult task. I then had to make an immediate treatment plan for her multiple fractures and bleeding, and then give my plan for a three-hour evacuation, all within 10mins (luckily we didn't have to carry out the 3hr evac!). We also went to the lake, where I was asked to teach a lifeguarding lesson to the course, sharing various towing strategies in the water and we did our CPR and defib evaluation on the beach. Note to self: If you try to do 10mins of CPR in shorts, on a beach full of vicious volcanic rocks, your knees will start to bleed... The final thing we learnt that day was how to inject drugs subcutaneously, which mean we all had to inject somebody else as well as ourselves. The needles were only small but I have to admit that it was a weird sensation sticking a needle into yourself, you'll all be glad to hear that it's not something I'll be making a habit of.

We finished the day by doing the final written exam which everyone was a bit nervous about. The main thing that worried me was that the exam, as well as the whole course, was in Spanish, so with some technical medical vocab I was just praying I'd understand it all. Thankfully I did and I passed with the highest practical and theoretical marks of the course! I now feel much more prepared to work in remote areas and be able to provide an appropriate level of first aid cover for the friends and/or clients that I paddle with. I was going to say that I look forward to putting the skills I learnt into practise, but in this case it's probably not appropriate!

Perhaps slightly oversized...