Thursday, July 15, 2010

The Downslope

So it's official...this Monday will mark 1 month and 1 week until my return to the good ol' U.S. of A.! Time flies as they say :)

School is going well and classes will be ending in just a couple of weeks. I thought they would extend the length of the semester since it began later, but I guess I thought wrong. I have my last exam on July 30th and I will be finished!! Grades are doing fairly well so far. I have no idea what I'm receiving in my Spanish class, or what happened to the class in gen
eral. I've shown up for the past 2 weeks but no one else has, including the professor. So it's my assumption that the class has ended! Operations management is the class I have an exam in on the 30th. I got an 88% on the 1st one (which is an A-) and an 82% on the 2nd one, so I should be averaging a B to B+, depending on my final exam. Management models is going very well. We don't have a final for the class, but I do have one 5 minute presentation to do next weekend, which should be a breeze. We just received grades back from our last presentation and exam: I got a 6.8 outta 7 on my presentation and a 6.2 on my exam. Not too shabby! It's always nice to know that you can still do well in classes even when they're taught in another language ;)

So since classes will be done sooner than my flight home, I will spend the 1st few weeks of August just working and hanging out with friends! I have a couple new students that I started teaching last week. One is the manager of Transelec which is an electric company here in Conce and the other works at Moly-cop where they manufacture steel balls that are used in the mining process. Both students require that I travel to their work to teach th
em, which is a-okay with me since Berlitz pays an extra unit for each class for travel time! I'm working on trying to contact the Berlitz in Cleveland, which is really close to my house, and ask about their need for teachers. My boss here has already agreed to give me a letter of recommendation and I would love to begin teaching again as soon as I return!

Not really a whole lot of exciting events to report. I still go out with the English class friends on Thursday nights. Someone mentioned karaoke tonight which instantly means I'll just be sitting back and watching! Sindy has been sick off and on lately and traveled to Santiago last week to see a specialist. They're still unsure of what the exact problem is but she seems to be feeling a little better this week. My friend Nicolas and I got to catch up a couple of weeks ago and talk about his recent travels through Europe. I now officially have 2 adopted families here; my host family and Susana's family. Susana and her family took me out this past Sunday to a restaurant called Rincón Campensino where they serve that down-home typical Chilean food. It was great! And they had me try this weird herb tea called Mote that supposedly has this loopy effect on foreigners because they're not accustomed to drinking it. I didn't experience the loopy effect but that's probably because I'm not a fan of hot tea-like drinks and wasn't a fan of the taste, therefore I didn't drink much of it. Here's a couple pics of the food and mote. Oh yea, and when the server found out I was from the US, he brought out this glass with a Chilean flag and an American flag. lol kinda funny but also it's like pointing a finger and saying 'hey, fresh american meat over here!'. Super yum food and over all a great experience!

Susana also recently took me to a birthday party with her for her very best friend Marcelo. I've met him and his friends before and they are all super nice people. So we went to his house to hang out for a bit and then we all went dancing. Here's a few pics from the party.
That's all I've got for now! Time to get back to some studying and homework. Can't wait to see you all next month!!

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