Progress

There have been some very fun and interesting developments here over the past week. Things are going very well and I am very happy. I am starting to get more responsibilities, and I'm starting to do more. This past weekend was very fun, and there was a lot less being hung over, so I'm happy about that. On saturday I got together with the three students who approached me about hanging out and being friends. It was a great, and I had a new experience with my own language learning.
On saturday I went to campus to meet up with the students around 2. The three that I hung out with are named Dayanne (the guy), Marjorie, and Roxana. The three of them are classmates studying accounting. Dayanne and Marjorie are in my English class with Ximena. Roxana is in a more advanced class because she chose to start studying English in her first year rather than her second when it is required. So I met up with them around two and then we took a bus downtown. Usually I just walk downtown because it's just across the bridge from campus, but it was raining and they wanted to take the bus. This was the first time that I'd taken a bus in Valdivia. The buses here are about half the size of the buses in the states and about 30 years older.
When we got downtown we went to a restaurant near La Feria. Since Valdivia is at the junction of the rivers, and only 20 minutes from the pacific, seafood is the staple. And the seafood is very fresh. We started with some empenadas mariscos, empenadas full of shellfish. I don't know what kind of shellfish was in them, but they were really, really good. Extremely fresh and just out of the fryer. These were just the apatizers though, and for the main course I had fried salmon. It was delicious. I ate just about everything, which is saying something because I'd just had lunch with Estela before I left. We stayed at the restaurant for a couple of hours and talked. We spoke a nice mixture of English and Spanish, but mostly Spanish. I tried to get them to speak English, and that would go well until there was a difficult word or concept, then it was back to Spanish. After an hour and half or so Marjorie had to leave, so Dayanne, Roxana and I started walking around the city and talking. We ended up in the mall, where we found a nice place to sit in the food court, and talked for a couple of hours.
This is where things started getting interesting for me. We'd been speaking some English, and a lot of Spanish. My Spanish is better than their English, so Spanish was the fall back language. When we first started hanging out that day they were nice enough to speak slowly for me. But as the day progressed, and I became more comfortable with listening to their Spanish, they started speaking faster. By this point my brain was starting to get tired. Listening to another language for such a long time requires a lot of concentration. So I was feeling a bit worn out. And then it happened, I started asking a question in English. I had to speak very slowly so they could understand me. And all of a sudden I realized that speaking English was way more work than speaking Spanish. Speaking Spanish with them was easier than speaking English. This was the first time that speaking another language was easier than speaking English for me. So it was pretty damn cool. After spending four and half hours with them I got to the point where I was speaking without thinking. There was no translating in my head, no hesitation while I tried to put a sentence together. I was very happy, to say the least.
After we hung out in the mall and talked for a few hours we decided to call it a night. It was about 7:30pm, and my brain was fried. So we made plans to hang out again next sunday and went our seperate ways. The whole experience was great for me, and I really felt like I'd made some progress with my Spanish.

Sunday I stayed in and did school work and checked my fantasy football scores religously. It was a very nice, relaxing day. Yesterday I had one class in the morning. Then in the afternoon I had a meeting with Ximena. She told me she wanted me to plan part of the lesson for today. Through my observations I noticed a common problem in all the classes and levels. The students here seem to be having trouble with the indefinate article, a/an. They don't seem to understand when to use it and when not to use it. For example, you don't use a/an with plural or noncount nouns. It is only used with countable, singular nouns. So I frequently hear things like, I have a long hair, instead of, I have long hair. So I made a nice lesson plan about this that I was going to present to the class, but, unfortunately, Ximena was sick today, so class was cancelled. But I'm hoping to teach the lesson tomorrow, if she is feeling better.
I am really excited to start actually teaching lessons. Up to this point my main use has been to provide the students with the sound of my native english speaker accent. This is all well and good, but I want to do more. I enjoy teaching, and I'd like to actually do it. Tomorrow should be a good day for it though. Hopefully Ximena will feel better so I'll be able to teach my grammar lesson. Then in my other class, I am going to be teaching a mini lesson on halloween. Apparently Chileans have started celebrating halloween in the recent past, so Raquel wants me to talk about its history and how we celebrate in the US.
After class tomorrow I am also going to start tutoring one of the pedagogy professors with Estela. Apparently he wants to learn English, and Estela asked me if I would be willing to help. I said, of course, so now we will be doing that every wednesday at 6pm. So Weds are going to be very busy for me from now on. Also, I am helping in another class now, but only once a week. Language classes here meet twice a week, but I will be meeting with a business class every thursday for the rest of the time I'm here. So I will be working in two and half classes, tutoring a professor, and helping my own students outside of class. I'm quite happy about all this, and very excited to really get started.

The weather here has been terrible over the last week. Tons of wind and pouring rain, so naturally I feel right at home. I think it's going to start clearing up next week, so I'm happy about that. I want to start enjoying the outside world here at least a little bit before I have to leave. I've been here for three and half weeks now, and it feels like a week and a half. Things are going by way too fast. I am really going to miss this country when I have to leave. It's a beautiful place with amazing people. I really hope I get the opportunity to come back someday. Well, that's it for now, hasta luego.