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!