Lago Todos Los Santos and Volcan Osorno

A great day of turismo today. I don't know if I have mentioned this before, but on occasions I have something I want to do on a trip and I get fairly peeved if we veer of course from this. This was what I wanted to do on this day, so I was pleased. We headed out from Puerto Varas in the direction of Lago Todos los Santos, which I don't really know why it had my attention captured so much. I had seen some pictures and said, yep, that's the place. I didn't read too much, but I did know that the National Park it is inside (Vicente Pérez Rosales) was the first in Chile. So that's something to the story. We were lucky with the weather and got some great views of the volcano.

This was meant to be a photo of us in front of the volcano. Of course, I am standing in front of the volcano, so you can't see the thing. Still a good shot of la familia. We carried on, stopping every now and then to try and get the volcano in the shot. Sometimes the clouds would cover it up, other times it would appear from behind the clouds. Our first stop was the Saltos de Petrohue. You have to pay a couple of bucks to go in, but it is well worth a visit. I am always fairly impressed by waterfalls, the sound and everything.

Just as we were about to head off from the falls we saw the volcano appear again from behind the clouds and looked to get the shot with the waterfall and the volcano together. This was the best I got, which turned out quite well. I have this wide shot option on my camera which has come in quite handy on this trip. Some pretty extensive scenes to take in.

Here we are again with the volcano - new angle this time, from the lake itself. Lago Todos los Santos. In the end we took a short boat ride with a very nice man, Jaime. It was 3,000 each for a half hour ride, which is absolutely fine. Six dollars is not very much and it was a great way to see the lake. You can do a ferry crossing to the other side, but that takes quite a long time, so this was a great opportunity to just take a quick look around. Later in the day we went some way up the volcano and had a very good lunch. The lady from our accommodation recommended that we go and check it out. It is at the base of a skifield, which of course you would think it adds double to the price, but it seemed it was quite a reasonable price (or that everything in this town is quite expensive). We are on the road again tomorrow, off to Chiloé. That's another place I have never been too, looking forward to checking that out.

Aprender Con Deportes

I have been working on a new program, the current name I am thinking of using is Aprender Con Deportes (Learn With Sports). I am going to write down my ideas for a two page outline in this blog post.

About Aprender Con Deportes

Aprender Con Deportes is a program to promote the learning of English with sports, in turn helping promote smaller sports. It is run by Daniel Boyle, an Australian freestyle footbag player living in Chile.

The first program is called "Let's Learn: Footbag". The plan is to expand into other sports and other activities. Aside from improving language skills and learning about new sports, the program aims to involve the students in other areas of the sport, in order to improve communication, leadership and other skills.

The Let's Learn: Footbag program is currently taking place at Liceo Los Almendros in La Florida, Santiago de Chile.

Mission

To use sports to promote learning, communication, leadership and teamwork while helping lesser known sports.

Vision

To successfully integrate learning through sports as a key part of the learning process, first in Latin America.

Aims

• Improve English speaking skills in Latin America
• Use sports to improve leadership and communication
• Work together with sporting organisations
• Receive government funding to support the program
• Expand the program to other languages outside of English
• Include indigenous languages
• Make the program available to people of all ages and backgrounds
• Promote the program through media appearances
  

Objectives

• Complete Let's Learn: Footbag program at Los Almendros
• Add one more school to the program by end of 2012
• Receive funding to support the program
• Link with other sporting organisations
• Be a part of the Elige Vivir Sano program
• Appear in the media five times in 2012
• Run ten programs by 2015
• Expand outside of Chile
• Combine with government programs to support language learning
• Expand to other languages in 2013
• Combine with other programs that promote sport
• Use embassies and foreign institutions to promote the program

Let's Learn: Footbag

The Let's Learn program aims to use a number of sports to promote the learning of languages. The pilot program matches the sport of Footbag (often known as Hacky Sack) with learning English. The first school is Los Almendros in La Florida.

The association came after a meeting at an event at the British Embassy, celebrating 100 Days until the Olympic Games. Following the meeting, Daniel Boyle gave a footbag performance at the school's "English Song Festival" as well as judging the performances. He will repeat this at a similar event  for all schools within the La Florida municipality.

The program at Los Almendros is an ongoing program in order to test various ideas, however the aim of the Let's Learn program is to create a ten week program, finishing with a final competition. The program is very flexible and can be changed for the needs of the students or institution.

The program currently stands as such:

1. Introduction to the sport and testing of levels
2. Sharing knowledge of the sport
3. Training in the sport (learning skills and training techniques)
4. Talking about the sport (commentary, marketing, media)
5. Assigning places for final presentation (players, coaches, judges, commentators, marketing, promotion, captains, etc)
6. Review of international competitions and the sport in Chile
7. Promoting the grand event
8. Training for final presentation
9. Final presentation (no audience)
10. Final presentation in front of an audience

About Footbag

Footbag is a sport using a small bag (pelotita), moving your legs and body around the bag to do tricks. There are two main disciplines to footbag: freestyle and net. The program aims to teach students about both disciplines and encourage a mixture of disciplines.

Footbag started in Portland, USA in the early 1970s. The strongest places for footbag currently are Poland, Finland, Czech Republic and parts of the USA and Canada.

About Daniel Boyle

Daniel Boyle is an Australian living in Chile. He has a Bachelor of Sports Management from the University of Canberra and a Master of Arts (Writing) from Swinburne University of Technology. Daniel has been competing in freestyle footbag since 2001 and has competed twice at the World Championships (2009, 2010). He was Australian champion in 2010 and was the judge of the first ever Malaysian Championships in 2011.

Daniel currently works as Content Manager and Sports Editor for English language news group I Love Chile. In order to promote footbag he has appeared in Las Ultimas Noticias and on the Megavision program Salta a la Vista. Daniel has played and performed footbag throughout the world.

  

Long time no see

Hello blog. No time no see. Don't know if you will see too many more posts in here for some time. But I would just like to say I have some ideas for a new issue of Capital Eyes. Of course it has been more than a year since the last one, so the dear fans will be salivating for a new issue...

Freestyle en la Iglesia

This is a story of modern times...

I sure have to say that today was a weird day. A couple of weeks ago, I finally came across some freestyle football players online. I haven't discovered any footbag players, but at least it's a pretty similar general idea. So every Sunday they meet at Bellas Artes. I went a fortnight ago, but couldn't make it again last week.

So anyway, I got down there and we started playing.

There are always some people walking by who want to have a kick around. Without fail, they kick the ball on to the road. It didn't really matter today as that part of the street was blocked for some reason.

I filmed a couple of short little videos with my camera. I have to start making more and more use of that, particularly for filming things. Anyhow - I didn't hit anything particularly special, no long runs. When you're playing with others though - it doesn't matter so much.

Particularly for me, I have been playing solo for six months now. I have really been missing the sessions with Caroline and Copey where you just call up and it's time to play. So it has been good to find these guys.

Here is a short little video of three of us playing together. I think these kind of videos are always fun. There are some great ones of Honza, Vasek etc. I filmed one a couple of years back with "Bevs" when he was visiting Canberra.

Anyhow. Our next stop was Plaza de Armas, which is the main square of Santiago. We were going to put on a bit of a show and hopefully get some bucks. We played a while, then a policeman signalled to me that I should come over. I partly played stupid (the other part was that I didn't really get it), and even now I wasn't sure what he meant. I think to stop blocking the pathway as too many people were watching.

That was only the beginning of the weird adventure though. We were able to play a bit longer, then went into the city centre. The some girls approached us and asked if we could do a performance at their youth event. por que no?

Well I can tell you exactly por que no, but instead we went there. It was some sort of "modern" church just across the road from La Moneda, the presidential palace.

The kind of modern establishment where they murmur to themselves (speaking in tongues???), place hands on each others heads and, a more rare element - perform some kind of fashion show in the middle of proceedings.

Aside from the language barrier, I honestly couldn't really understand what was going on. I don't think I would have got it if it was in English either. I will just say that they were all completely crazy. After the "fashion show", then there was some kind of contest where there was a crowd vote for the most popular, but yelling and screaming.

I think these were the exact types that old mate Jesus was throwing out when he cleared the traders from the temple. Anyhow, then there was some kind of dance off after the fashion show, and a couple of us presented our skills in that time. I have some video but I will have to make some edits to that, as it doesn't look so good.

So some of us headed for the exit, but then it was decided to stay. The deal that had been struck was these bunch of crazy people would give more and more likes to the page of the freestyle group. A deal worth it? Who knows?

All I know is that it was definitely the most strange place I have given a footbag demonstration. It even beats out the Castlemaine Prison!

Writing Writing Writing

Hi all

My real aim is to make this my "writing" blog, where I share all my exciting news about the journey of "becoming a writer". Honestly as well, part of that whole journey is showing of your stuff, but I really haven't been keeping up with that lately.

Some things I have been up to:

Richard Branson was in town - the articles I wrote were mentioned on the Virgin website in an article there called "Richard creates a stir in Latin America"

Went to an Olympic event at the residence of the British Ambassador 


Went to an event where a former Miss Universe was there - http://ilovechile.cl/2012/04/20/cecilia-bolocco-guest-honor-chile/54041

This weekend is the superclásico with La U and Colo Colo.

During the week I went to an ANZAC day ceremony at the residence of the New Zealand ambassador.

I have applied for a couple more writing gigs and am beginning to research into more ideas about freelancing and other ways of getting bucks for writing.

We have managed to get out of Santiago the last few weekends as well. I will write more on that later.

I will try and keep this much more updated and about my ideas and "career..." as a "writer".

My first cover

I sure have been busy this week. What I haven't even got the chance to write about is that I have my first ever cover of a printed newspaper.

Here is a photo of the bunch of the team at I Love Chile, with a few copies of the paper in hand.

I wrote a story about the retirement of Fernando González. Unfortunately I didn't get to interview him, but that might happen in the future. I also wrote a bunch of other stories in there. If you want to read a digital copy - click here.

I have also started teaching some English classes - my main one is with Héctor, a tattoo artist. We are having a daily conversation class as he prepares to head to Europe. A good bloke, we have some cool chats.

Crosses at Lollapalooza

I don't know if I have been living under a rock, but the first time I heard about Crosses was just in the last couple of days when I read an interview with Chino Moreno in La Tercera. On further reading it turned out they were playing Lollapalooza, which I was already going too.

We got a couple of press passes to go, which was nice of them, although we had to fight to get them.

So anyhow, I just watched a couple of clips this morning and thought, hey that sounds pretty good. I wasn't as into it as regular Deftones stuff, although I haven't listened to them in a fair while. Seeing them live though, I was thoroughly impressed.

The band have two drummers (I'm not sure if it's still the same, but I think it's a guy from Far and a guy from Dredg). There is a pretty big electronic element to the music (ie there are three guys playing samplers or keyboards at some stage in the band). It's more about an atmospheric sound than a sort of techno style though.

The best thing though that is that Chino was in fine form. In pretty good shape also, I remember developing a theory that his vocal performance depended on his always fluctuating weight. The performance was great though.

Today we went to a farewell lunch for a friend, Isabel, she will move to Buenos Aires, so we will have to go and visit sometime. I was actually planning to go to Argentina next week, to watch La U in the Copa Libertadores in Mendoza, but it was all too difficult.

Anyway, we went to the lunch and I ate too much, so I didn't really feel good, so I left the festival early. If I didn't have the press pass I would not go to the festival. Foo Fighters are going to be playing a 2.5 hour set tomorrow, which will be great. However, I am really wondering if I will bother going to the rest of the festival at all. Let's see...

Today I was just by myself and not so much in the mood for talking to people or making new friends. Mainly because my tummy was rumbling. Anyway, the point of the story is that Crosses were really good.