Pedro Garcias Chile Academy

Vamos Chile!!

Copa America semi final tomorrow vs Peru.

🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱🇨🇱

Great to all catch up today for some bowling, pizza and drinks and most importantly the boys and Pedro revealing the trophies and gifts they won on there recent trip to Chile. Again big congratulations to the boys, the traveling Dads and Pedro Garcias Riffo for the most amazing opportunity and culture experience of a life time! ⚽️

Pedro is keeping some very dodgy company!!

Some more photos of the meal on the last night and the travel day.

Day 12 - Last full day and another big one. We went to Arauco and met the mayor. Then off to the primary school and college to meet the kids and have a look around, lunch and then the local stadium for the game. A 4-1 win with 2 goals from Alistair, one from Josh R and one from Andre to take his tally for the tour to 10. Very impressive!! The boys turned in a quality performance across the board today.
A big drive to Santiago awaits tomorrow and then the flight home. The whole trip has been an experience we'll never forget. The boys have been a pleasure to be with and I recommend Chile for a visit to everyone. They're all like Pedro, it's great!!!
Travel is all about learning, and one thing we all learned on this trip is that the Spanish word for rum.....is Ron.

Regards
Rob, Craig, Matt and rum

Day 11 - Today we had breakfast whenever we wanted as long as we were ready by 9am to leave and visit a primary school. We visited a English class room, most of the kids asked some of their questions in English. It was very nice to see them speaking English to us. This school was a very poor school so the school was free for the students. We had a small morning tea at the primary school, said our thanks and good byes and left on the road again heading to a mine, the mine was called El Chiflon del Diablo (the wind of the devil) and was the only mine in Chile/the world that was open for others to walk through. The man who lead us around the mine and told us about it was a miner himself in another mine but his family had worked throughout this mine here in Chile. When he was explain about the mine you could tell he was emotional and that it was bringing back memories. He told us story’s about the mine and how the workers had to cope through a large number of struggles. We the had to walk back up the mine, very hard on the legs going through small spaces and steep tunnels. When we got out we headed out to get lunch. The meals were very nice, based on the beach. We then headed out arriving back at the hotel, we rested until 6:30 and meet at reception to go watch a football game with a team which Pedro had played for. Pedro’s team won with a victory of 2-0. We headed back to the hotel and got pizza for dinner and waited at reception for ages... about 1 1/2 hours.

Day 10

We had breakfast at 8:30, then headed to the national stadium for a tour, we got to see the press conference room, media rooms, changing rooms and the field. Then we headed off to quillon which was an hour and a half long drive from the stadium. We had lunch there which was chicken and rice, and walked around the town. Then we went to the game which was a tough match which we lost 2-0, they gave us a good cake afterwards. After that we headed off back to the international stadium to watch the first division game of Universidad Concepcion vs Iquique where Unversidad Concepcion won 3-0.

See you tomorrow when we go to the mine.

Lachie and Connor

Day 9

Today was a relatively early start for the boys with most of us getting up to eat breakfast at around 7:15.
Then we left at 9:15, and headed for Wessex school to play their football team.
The view from getting out the bus was a very small, dry (hard as concrete) pitch with considerably small goals with rugby posts around them. Our opponents were also very capable in the language of English.
Dan McKay filled in as an amazing linesman during the first half keeping the referee up to standard. The game started off as a very even, tight first half. Then at half time Wessex brought on 4 new players who were very skillful lads. Nine of the boys on the paddock in the second half were all in the U-18 Universidad de Concepcion Academy team ( Division 1 Professional Academy ). These boys helped to spread apart our defense line and the game ended with a 3-1 loss.
Following the game their captain who spoke very good English welcomed us to some mini hotdogs and some drinks. But we can't forget Joshua McCarroll's very professional, well spoken speech prior to eating. After the divine small hot dogs we moved onto the shopping malls where we also ate lunch. After 2 hours of intense shopping we went back to the hotel, and had a few hours to relax before marvellous dinner which consisted of pollo (chicken) carne de vaca (beef), patata and vegetal(vegetables).

By Dan and Josh