Into the Final Third

  As somebody who is on a mammoth trip abroad, and somebody with an Apple smartphone, its only predictable that I have an application on my phone dedicated to a countdown. You know, the ones that you track the approaching of big upcoming events with big exaggerated numbers of months/days/hours/seconds/mili-seconds and so on. I actually only downloaded mine a few weeks ago and I haven't really been paying it much attention, but today I decided to take a look at it...

Flight to Argentina - 114 days, 15 hours, 57 minutes since 12th July 2016. 

Homecoming (Flight Home to the UK) - 44 days, 8 hours, 3 mins until 18th December 2016. 

  So I'm a month and a half away from heading home and ending my Argentinean adventure, well into the final third of my first half of my year abroad (all the fractions). This revelation gives me a mixed bag of emotions. I'm inevitably excited to fly back to the UK into the depth of British Christmas, to see family and friends for the first time in half a year, to be home. Yet an equal sense of sadness and panic set in when I realise my time in this incredible country is nearly up. 

6 weeks left in this beautiful
place.

  I'll be the first to admit that on leaving the UK I never expected to feel so at home on the other side of the World as I have done. If you'd asked me to predict my sense of feeling on the 3rd November, I would have guessed that I would be eager for the last month and a half to pass so I could jump on the plane back to the comfort of the UK. Yet my current emotion is one of stark parallel. 

 I feel more comfortable and more integrated here than ever, with a host of new friends and acquaintances (English and Argentinean) that it'll be sad to leave behind. There's a list of things to do and places to visit in this country that I'm running out of time to plan. The 18th December is as much a deadline as anything. So I thought I'd write this little update piece to outline some of my plans for the next 6 weeks before I head home to England.  

Dancing In The Wind

  Picture the scene. I am stood in a tarpaulin tent with rain lashing down outside and the hurricane winds lifting the sides up and letting the hellish conditions pollute my temporary dance studio. One child is attempting to hug the stranded, flea-ridden mut that is known as 'Dead Dog'. Another is stamping against the temporary flooring letting in a flood of muddy water. The rest are looking towards their councillor for inspiration. The councillor in question was me, and I was trying to conjure up a dance routine that would suitably pass as a 'punk-rock' edition of Hakuna Matata.

  Welcome to camp.

'Team Jack' about to perform the
Circle of Life set with my
'choreography'

  This was my last group out of four, having already worked me and three other groups of 11 year olds through Circle of Life (Jazz style), Just Can't Wait To Be King (Hip-Hop) and Can You Feel The Love Tonight (Opera). In case you hadn't already noticed we were preparing for a production of The Lion King, which would uniquely incorporate a variety of dancing styles. In charge of this was a man with only two years of dancing experience in a 'street dance' group called 'Dance Dudes' between the ages of 8 and 10. If we add this to years of drunken nightclub dancing then we have quite a resumé - but that didn't quite suffice to 35 eleven year old Argentinean kids.

  I was one of six councillors working on the Lights, Camera, Action English immersion camp with a theme of musicals. As you can imagine I wasn't necessarily picked for my suitability to the theme, but pretty much at random in the line of poor sods that had to spend 3/4 days entertaining a group of school-kids. In this case it was an epic four-dayer, the longest camp provided by the company, and with a theme that had never been done before. If being called for a camp was like jury-duty, I'd been handed a complicated fraud case.