When universes collide – the Patagonian update!

27/05/2013

I knew from day one that there would be a clash! The Western way of doing things vs the Patagonian style... And as you can guess it is not easy to plan anything here because things don’t simply happen or take place later than expected. I give you a little bit of a flavour of what I have observed here so far.

There was a running race from Chacabuco to Puerto Aysén on Sunday! It started 15 minutes late and it was 6k shorter of what had been advertised as a half marathon here https://www.facebook.com/#!/events/193498810803122/! Not to mention that there was no official information about the race until Monday the 20^th of May.

A football match was to take place between my school and another one – it got cancelled three times on the trot before we eventually managed to play a game - on two occasions this very unimportant inconvenience was not communicated to me at all.

Other initiatives such as the opening of the new leisure centre/hiking with the guys from my school got postponed/cancelled as well … – the latter on a number of occasions - officially due to bad weather. The problem is that the weather around here is pretty crap all the time so if you want to get something done the 'just do it' approach seems to be the only acceptable one. And when I did go and ask for the third time when I would be able to swim in the brand new and very first swimming pool in Puerto Aysén, I was told that soon... - maybe in two/three weeks time.

Cancelled/delayed lessons/meetings (cross out the unnecessary words) are not a novelty anymore either. Also I am not quire sure when the 3 week holiday break starts in July and I wouldn’t put any money on this happening within the timescales mentioned by the vice director a few weeks ago.

To wrap up, let me also tell you that the guy who was supposed to pick up us from the airport upon our arrival forgot to turn up! Yes, I know, things like that happen everywhere, well almost everywhere…
Welcome to Patagonia!