martedì 24 settembre 2013

September holidays!

Hi!

I hope you are all fine! So the summer is over for you and spring starts for me...even though in Montevideo the temperature barely reaches 5 degrees...

It's quite a long time I don't write. The point is, I had some days off!

Last week we had September holiday, so what an occasion for discovering one part of Uruguay! I couldn't miss it, so I left on Wednesday morning heading to Mercedes, which is a small town on the west. 




 The weather was beautiful and I asked all the people around to move away to let me take these pictures :)






As you can see in this picture, Uruguayan fight the heat of the summer days, eating with their legs in the water :)






Once in Salto I could enjoy 3 Summer days. Salto is famous in Uruguay for its thermal waters. I just needed 2 relaxing day after all challenges of the school!  
Not only did I bath though! I got to know 4 very friendly Uruguayans with whom I spent some times and who made me discover some part of the city. The most funny part was when they discover where I live...in "La Teja". At the beginning they thought I was working with kids of "La Teja" not actually living there.

As soon as they understood I was actually living there, they looked at me with widening their eyes in disbelief and started asking how it was to be there. Some of them have been living in the city for years but never dared to come even close to the place where I'm staying...So I was explaining them and showing them some pictures :)
 
So let me know if you still want to visit me here ;). It'll be adventurous to be in place where even the people from here judge as a "no go!". 





Apart from the Therms, there was not really much to see around the city, so I ended up learning how to use the potential of my camera...I let you judge if I was successful :)

Chapter Tango: yesterday I had my second class. After the big success of the first one, I was plenty of expectation...the problem was that the teacher too was if possible even more plenty of expectations than me. So he was trying to teach me like 4 different moves which was quite a difficult task for me...

 


<-- What I tried to apply...

What the teacher wanted me to apply...........-->










But apart from hitting some couples which were on my (our) path and hitting a door and stepping on my partner feet 4-5 times nothing else went wrong :) But I don't have to give up! But yeah, it's more difficult than I had thought two weeks ago! 



Good, I better go to sleep now because tomorrow is going to be another long day here! I hope you enjoyed reading this post and could laugh a little! Next time I'd like to write something more about my students and it'll be less funny but I hope equally interesting for you...

Have a nice week!

Bye!

mercoledì 11 settembre 2013

Between a dance and a soccer match

¡Hola gurices! ¿Como andan?

Disculpe...I forgot I should write in English...so, it's a long time you don't get news from Montevideo. 

In last days I was busy with different tasks. In the school I was help some teachers giving their class. We generally split the students in two groups and try to answer all their questions. This is often a quite difficult task because the students are used to ask: "Teacher, tell me how to do this!". Basically, they are only interested in finishing as soon as possible without understanding what they are doing. So I always try to answer with an another question: "You tell me, what you think first, then I might help you...". They don't usually like this...it's very hard for them even to stop for a minute and try to think with their own brain...well, I don't give up, so as long as I'm in class either they start think or they get frustrated because I don't tell them the solution...One very big issue here is the difference which exist in the class. So in the same class I have students who can work with functions, others who can only use the four basic operation and others who need to calculate 7x3 with their fingers...this make the job of the teachers incredibly difficult. Obviously, we don't have the resource to split the classes in different groups, because we don't have the rooms and the teachers to do that...so Obama's slogan was slighty changed into; "Yes, we do what we can!"

We are organising two excursions with our classes: 3 days in December. We'll go camping on a beach.

 In order to pay for the trip we organise  a  sort of street sale in the school every month.


  Each of this peace of clothes costs 10 UYU = 0.40 CHF. Some of them are quite nice. There were lots of people coming for buying so we ended with 6´000 UYU...not bad :-) 











But now, let's come to the title! It was time to get involved in the lifestyle of Uruguay. And in Uruguay there are two things you must experience: a soccer match and...tango. 
So I started on Monday with my first tango class...and I was quite unsure about how much I would have liked it...Of course, I couldn't take a tango course for tourists and go dancing in an elegant and expensive dance school :-) . So I ended up going with two teachers of my school in a very old colonial house. The first impact was a little scary. I was the first coming, as a good "Swiss" should do. I got in the house, which was like a ghost house. With broken walls, strange decoration, candle lights. The atmosphere was somehow tense. In this house lives Juan. He is a young guy who lives renting some rooms in the house and giving tango classes. One hour costs 50 UYU = 2 Swiss Francs!!! Sometimes we say: "you get what you pay for". This sentence couldn't be more wrong in this case! Juan is a great dancer. He travels all over the world giving tango shows. Now two other teacher of this school are in Russia for instance for a show. Juan lives for tango. After decripting what Juan was telling me (he isn´t the easiest teacher to understand because he puts a lot of feelings in the dance!) I started learnig the basics with enough success and even more important, a lot of fun!
My level now



...not yet my level :-)











The only thing which is more popular than Tango here is...la celeste. The national team of Uruguay is trying to qualifying for Brasil 2014. Yesterday they played vs Columbia. So I was in the "Estadio Centenario" to see the match. In this Stadion took place the first final of a WC in 1930!

Curiosity: you know the meaning of the 4 full stars and the empty one in the middle? Well the 4 full stars stay for the 4 World Cup won by Uruguay. Everyone soccer fan in the world knows that Uruguay only won 2 WC...but Uruguay is the only place on Earth, where Uruguay won 4! How is it possible? Well they calculate the olympic titles they won before 1930 as WC because the WC didn't exist :-). And of course the fifth star, stays for the title they are going to win next year :)
 The atmosphere in the stadium was very warm. All singing and jumping all over the place and when Uruguay scored some people almost cried! People were very correct. Each part of the stadium was encouraging its team. The Uruguayan and Columbian also collaborated perfectly when it was time to insult the referee.  This is the third most popular sport here :)So, two nations, one voice: "Hijo de p...! Vos sós un hijo de p...". "p" stays obviously for Paraguay, the country the referee was from :)

 Well, I let you admire a sunset over Montevideo now. I will put some news online very soon! Bye!