Pucon

The past weekend I traveled to Pucon, a beautiful touristy town about 3 hours away from Valdivia. There are several lakes around, and a big active volcano (last eruption 1971). Most people travel here to do X-treme things like x-treme snowboarding, x-treme river rafting, and regular volcano climbing. We were on a budget so we didn't do any of those things. Instead, the first day we went walking by the lake and this guy let us go out in his paddle boat for awhile. I definitely gave me arms a lot  of exercise, not that those guns need it or anything. The second day there we rented bikes and explored some really nice trails in the countryside. It was a great time indeed, and the Volcano didn't erupt while we there, allowing us to narrowly escape complete annihilation and lava related deaths. Otherwise, I am doing really well here in Valdivia and everything is going great.

Fiestas Patrias

So today, the 18th of September is Chile's birthday. Chileans celebrate this by having a lots of parties and eating lots and lots of Chilean food, drinking Chilean wine and dancing chilean dances. There is no school today because it's a national holiday, but we had a celebration at school earlier in the week. I took some pictures of some of my students all dressed up in special Chilean clothes and I learned how to dance (horribly) the national chilean dance, la cueca. The students also presented songs and dances, and I videotaped a little.

Valdivia Pictures

Here of some pictures I took of the costanera in Valdivia. There was a submarine and some sea lions out about. yeah.