Monday 11th January

Light breakfast of bread,  butter yoghurt and instant coffee. About 20 minute walk to the Bella Vista school. Quick interview to establish that I am level zero and paid the fees. Just chatting to people in the reception area I was surprised to find two Portuguese, one, Atu, working here and the other, a young woman wearing a tee shirt claiming that someday she will stop being adorable, studying engineering in Sao Paulo. And, yes, she did look adorable! Also a Dutch guy living here with his girlfriend and a German tourist. 

Escuella Bellavista (Photo from Website)
http://www.escuelabellavista.cl

At 10 we joined our class with Jo, a very vivacious and bubbly teacher. Around the table were M, a Turkish business administrator, me, F from Germany who plans to bike from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt, ~2000km, Kim, a Korean high school student, D, a Brazilian professor/teacher of Portuguese, L a software developer from Yorkshire and N an anthropology student from Norway. An hour and a half of information overload!  Half hour break with some coffee to keep me going and then another 90 minutes with a different teacher. Hope some of torrent of information sinks in. Most of us went for lunch at a restaurant downstairs, where I had the healthy salad and a coke. At 2.45 pm I had my one-to-one session with Lu which turned into a 2 to 1 when E, an English woman joined us. I was quite pleased since it made the session less intense. Focused on "ser" & "estar" two different types of the verb to be. By the time we finished I was quite over-whelmed!

Walked back to the city centre, passing a couple of small areas still awaiting the developers. Seems a shame to bulldoze them but guess the economics of upgrading single story buildings vs building new 20 storey blocks just doesn't add up.  And the plus side is that, hopefully, lots of middle class people get to live close to the city centre keeping it alive. Managed to get some photos of the Santa Lucia hill with the evening sunshine.

Waiting for the Developers to Move In

Santa Lucia Hill in the Evening sun

Went back to Lastaria where at 7.30 I actually managed to get a table at Boca Nariz, the bar recommended by the Guardian.

It's much more of a restaurant than a bar but it has an interesting menu and an arrangement where you can get three small glasses of different wines to try. I went for the "Classic" wine collection, a Merlot, a Malbec and a Cabernet Sauvignon. Much preferred the Cabernet Sauvignon of the three but I'm not much of wine connoisseur. To go with the wine I had medallions of venison which were pleasant enough but somewhat lacking in flavour, not up to the lamb I had a couple of days ago. Had a cappuccino to wake me up, then back to my room to do my homework