english meetings and an interesting gym experience (lunes, 4 octubre)

Classes went by super well today. My students were overall really good, and time flew by. I got hit by a soccer ball (again) as I was walking through the gym area on my way to the teachers lounge for lunch. Apparently there must be a shortage of soccer balls here because I´ve seen the kids using all sorts of things to play. I´ve started compiling a list of everything I have seen these kids using as a soccer ball:

-wiffle balls, T-shirt wrapped in saran wrap, oranges (always fun when one of the oranges gets kicked too hard...), crumpled up paper wrapped in tin foil, squashed up pop cans, plastic bottles, bottle caps, and I´m sure the list will eventually get longer.

After school I felt like running but didn´t have the time because I had to prepare a power-point presentation for the monthly English teachers´meeting tonight. I chose the topic of classroom management, and finished the presentation just a few minutes before I had to leave the house. I shouldn´t have worried, because it turns out no one is EVER on time for these things. Today there were people visiting from the Santiago office and the US embassy. I hadn´t realized I´d be giving my presentation in front of them, but overall it seemed like it went well.

After the meeting I went to the gym that a few people had told me about on the corner of Rancagua con Tadeo Hanke. Let´s just say it was an interesting experience. I walked in and gave the guy my 500 pesos (which is about 1 US dollar) and went to the bathroom to change. The first elliptical I tried to use didn´t work. One of the guys working there came running over to explain that it didn´t work. He asked if I wanted to do cardio or weights. When I told him cardio, he asked if he could show me how to use all the weights. I don´t usually lift but I figured it would be good to lift a little bit, do a different kind of workout than normal. The guy working there, Marcelio, was really nice and explained all of the weights. It was a little bit weird because there was only one other female in the gym besides me, and the guys there kept giving me looks. One of them came up to me and said in really bad English, ¨you...look...cool.¨ I had to try not to laugh. After doing a few circuits of weights (which seemed easier to lift than last time I tried to...which was in college...), I got on the only elliptical there that actually works. I actually liked lifting, which is weird because I always hated it when our track and cross-country coach made us lift at the beginning of practice. I think I might try to come to the gym to lift a few times a week. It´ll help my muscles out and be beneficial to my running. On a different note, I also need to stop procrastinating and find a place where I can sign up for yoga classes.

There were no treadmills, and only one of the four ellipticals actually worked. And the elliptical only had one setting, which wasn´t enough resistance for me. There weren´t locker rooms, just a kind of dirty bathroom in which the floor was partly flooded. The ceiling/roof of the gym was nothing more than a thin tin sheet, and there was part of a tree growing inside of the gym. The walls were falling apart cement blocks with 80´s style posters hanging up everywhere of muscle men and women in aerobics suits and big hair. There was actually space between the top of the walls and the edges of the ceiling where you could see outside. I suppose it made sense because there´s never rain or severe weather in Iquique, but it was still kind of weird. The equipment was rather primitive, but it worked okay. I wish the elliptical had worked better, and that there was a treadmill because I really felt like running last night. I did an hour on the elliptical before the gym closed at 11.

After I changed back into my normal clothes, Marcelio was asking me all these questions- the normal where I´m from, where I work, if I like Iquique, and if I go running a lot and so forth. He said he knew another English teacher from the States and I figured out he was talking about Caroline. He seemed surprised that I knew her.

When I got home I showered and then practiced the guitar for a bit. My host dad was in one of his crabby moods again, and at 12:30 yelled at me for still being awake. I tried to explain that I don´t normally go to sleep until closer to 1 or 2am, and that I don´t need a whole lot of sleep, but them my host dad went shuffling off to their room, so I stopped playing the guitar. Most of the time I think it´s hard to figure him out. One minute he´s really nice and joking about things, and the next minute he´s all grumpy. I like my host family a lot. My brothers are cool, but sometimes I think I´m just not used to living with a family anymore.

Tomorrow is going to be a long day. I work from 9:15 until 4:30 and after that I have choir until 6:30. But I should head to bed now....even though I´m not really tired...