throwing a line out to sea, to see if I can catch a dream.

This proves how utterly rubbish I am at keeping anything resembling a diary. It has been a week without updates.
Anyway, on Tuesday we finally started doing some proper teaching. I was over the moon. We worked all day with a variety of ages groups doing conversation classes. I met Tilly and Gloria who have volunteering in the school for many years. They are both qualified teachers and will be helping us throughout our year here. Tilly was explaining to us how a lot of the students at San Luis Beltran come from difficult social backgrounds and have very low selfesteems. She mention one case of a child that was misbehaving in class, so the teacher sent a letter home to his parents. The next day, the child came into school with a blackeye. As you can imagine, the school never sent a letter home again.
Straight after school, me and Charlotte headed down to Maipu where there are lots of shopping malls. I needed to buy a chilean SIM card. I was once again suprised at the low cost of electronical goods. My SIM card, for example cost me 5000pesos (about 5 euros).
On Wednesday it was Jessica’s birthday and Charlotte and I had offered to cook a nice meal for the family. We decided on a nice and easy pasta dish and a Lemon meringue pie. We arrived late home from school because we had last minute lesson planning to do for the next day and start cooking straight away. It wasn’t until we had started when I realised that there were no whisks and a completely uncontrollable stove and oven. Nightmare. The food turned out okay, well, the pasta was really good but the desert pastry was a tadd burnt. Not to worry, it was eaten nevertheless.
This weekend we climbed San Cristobal with some of the other volunteers. We all met at Nuble and after some delay Charlotte, Kirsten, Sinead, Ed, Aaron, Tobias, some Chileans and myelf all set off up the mountain. We reached the top in about 2 hours and we were exhausted. It was decided that it would be a nice idea to get the cable car down the mountain which is a snip at only 900pesos each so well worth it. We got some lunch and a few drinks and pareted ways at round 5 O’clock. Charlotte and I had to rush home cause we had birthday party to go to that evening. It was Paula 10th birthday and even though we were shattered after a long day we had to make an appearance. Once again it was a big family event with lots of decorations, music and party food.
On the Sunday Charlotte received some bad news. She might have to go back to Hong Kong for a few weeks because of an illness in the family. Both she and I are hoping she won’t have to go. The flights are very expensive and it would be a shame to have to leave the project. Despite this, we decided it would be good idea to go out for the afternoon to try and keep her mind off things. We met up with Aaron and Tobias at Franklin metro station and went to their local market. Franklin metro station is known for being the most dangerous station in Santiago and we were advised to travel very light. Carrying only the necessary money, Bip! card and wearing no jewelry. On telling our hosts where we were going, Carolina gave us a look of sheer horror as if to say, “Do you want to get mugged or something?” We remained optimistic and passed through Franklin station unharmed and with all our belongings in tact. The market in Franklin is the second largest market in Santiago where you can buy ANYTHING, from clothing to electronical goods. On arrival I had slightly underestimated it, thinking it was probably about the size of a spanish market as some of them can be quite large. I would say you could walk around it for about 4 hours still not having seen everything. We had had enough after around an hour an a half. After a while everything looked the same and I wondered if we had been walking around in circles. I would still recommend going to see it, purely for it’s sheer enormity.

Title.. She had the world - Panic! at the disco