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!!!