Birthday and school outing

Mary, mother of Jesus statue

Santiago, quite a lot of smog

Quite a lot has happened over the last couple of days but I shall try not to ramble too much. This past week has seen an entire SIM audit with two lovely ladies visiting us from the States. On Saturday Carmen and I took them around the centre of town to show them a bit of the city before they left. We took a tram up to the top of Cerro San Cristobál which was awesome (and no walking involved). It was pretty crazy to see the big stature of Mary at the top and I couldn't help noticing that the Jesus statue is a lot smaller and further down the hill. I'm still finding the Catholic influence hard to understand. When I got home from town I decorated the cake for Pedro and Sammi's birthday. I have to admit to being rather proud of it and I think the boys loved it.

My cake! And yes, it is a guitar

So we had their joint party on Sunday afternoon with lots of food and friends around to share it. Sammi was very excited but I'm not sure how much Pedro understood. But he was happy enough to be getting new things and eat plenty of sugary goodness.

Sammi with a marshmallow ice-cream and Transformer

Family and cake time

Pedro ripping into it

Dinosaurs! Can't go wrong

Today us 5 teachers took 60 kids to the national library. Great child:teacher ratio don't you think??? Nah, it went really well and was nice to get out of school for a bit too. The library is obviously used to having this type of group in and had plenty of things for them to look at and do. I must admit to being pretty tempted to head back there myself and browse through the books. Some really good ones that have both English and Spanish and I noticed some German books too. Rather impressive really.

Lining up outside (Pre-Kinder only)

Whole school listening to a story

I'm slowly getting used to this new routine and even managed to sleep almost to my alarm today (instead waking up every hour waiting for it). The season has definitely changed and we haven't hit 30 for a week now. I'm quite enjoying our 23-27 degree range and it is finally a decent temperature at night for sleeping. This weekend I'm heading to an Easter retreat with the youth from church. Please note that "youth" here means anyone between 13 and 30 so I suspect it will be an interesting time!