My first week in El Bolson has been fairly uneventful, I still have no idea when school is going to start but I have found out that classes will be at a different school a few more blocks away and I will go there for one week, then the next week work at home and so on because I think we are going to share the school with the students that were already there. It’s good and bad at the same time, less school, but more spare time to try and find things to do.
The other day I went for a ‘bike ride’ with Moritz from Switzerland and his host brother, it turned out to be more of a mountain climb. I ended up getting of my bike and walking because it was so steep. It was nice though because there are lots of wild blackberries growing all along the side of the road so I stopped to eat them a few times. After about an hour we reached a lookout point that looks down over Rio Azul and the valley, we then biked about 10 more minutes to look at ‘La Cabeza Del India’, it is a huge cliff face that looks like it has a face carved into it. To get to it there is about a 5 min walk up in the bush, so of course we took the horse track that leads up the mountain instead of the real one to La Cabeza. After walking about 15 min of steep uphill walking we finally realized we had gone the wrong way and had to backtrack the whole thing.
The next day I went to Lago Puelo with my host family, a small town next to a lake about 15 min away from El Bolson, it is in another province called Chubut, I didn’t realise that my town is right on the border of Rio Negro province and Chubut. We went on a walk in the forest and had mate and pastries, it was quite nice and reminded me of Te Anau. We went out for pizza that night and had cheese, ham, pineapple and strawberry pizza – the weirdest combination I’ve ever seen but it worked haha. I feel really safe here, even though the windows have bars and it looks scary, me and my host sisters can still go out to the centre at 11pm for ice-cream and I don’t feel like I’m going to get mugged, unlike in Buenos Aires.
I haven’t really done much else, I got all my school books although I have no idea when the school starts and got my ear pierced because my host sister wanted her nose pierced (sorry mum! I hope you still love me). We go to town every now and then but mostly I’m just sitting around waiting for school to start so that I can finally make some friends. It’s getting easier to understand Spanish but it’s still not easy, I feel stupid when people ask me questions and I don’t understand, and then I wish I could just go back to Invercargill where life is easy and I end up feeling homesick. Even the smallest things are hard to adjust to, like eating dinner at 10.30pm every night instead of 6pm or not being able to wear bare feet in the house, it probably sounds stupid to everyone else but I never realised how different life is outside of your own comfort zone and in another culture. You can’t even begin to imagine how different it is until your living in it, I can’t really put my finger on all the things that make it different, but it seems like a whole new world. You have to learn how to behave and act and speak again. It’s not easy at the start, but I’m sure the feeling will pass and soon I won’t want to leave.
No comments:
Post a Comment