Employment Update

After months of being unemployed, the impossible has finally happened. Both Erin and I have managed to find jobs. Starting next week we'll both be working for ComuniCorp, the best English institute in the city. Getting the jobs was relatively simple after the recommendations that James gave us, but we still had to do a demo lesson for one of the school's directors. It was basically a try-out, with one real student and the director watching (she also had the incredibly annoying habit of interrupting your lesson to tell you what to do, which bugged the hell out of me). Regardless, both of us did fine, and Erin has already been assigned to work a couple hours a day with a Korean teenage girl, who is receiving seven hours of private instruction per day. She'll probably speak better than I do in about a month.

Originally, there was talk of having me do lessons in Rancagua, a town an hour and a half away from Santiago, but after accepting the job, I gave it the five minutes of thought necessary to realize I didn't come to Chile to spend three hours a day commuting. We were both a little concerned that I might have had to quit the day after I got the job, but I called back this morning, and they said they had enough work for me here in Santiago, so I get to keep the job and not travel an ungodly amount.

The other thing that's going on is that our tourist visas are about to expire. This isn't a huge deal. It happens every three months, and all it takes to renew them is to leave the country and come back a day later. This would normally be an incredibly easy thing to do, because Mendoza, Argentina is right across the Andes, waiting for you with several big plates of cheap, delicious steak. We thought we'd take the trip to celebrate our new jobs, but we woke up this morning to find it pouring rain for the first time in a month and a half. Since rain turns to snow in the Andes, all bus services through the mountains are cancelled, and we arrived at the bus station just to be sent home again. Trips to the bus station never seem to go as planned for us, but with any luck the roads will be clear tomorrow and we'll be wolfing down platefuls of meat at an all-you-can-eat Argentinian buffet.

Aside from that, life has pretty much continued as normal. My biggest complaint to date is that the Chilenos refuse to walk on one side of the sidewalk. Maybe I've spent too many days marching fifth graders up and down hallways, but damn it, it just makes sense to pick a side. I don't care if it's left or right, but people weaving through each other wouldn't work on the highway and it doesn't work on the sidewalk either. I've talked about this with every Chileno I feel comfortable criticizing, and they all agree. The other thing I've noticed about Chile is that the people here are way more racist, and I think it might just be because the population is so homogenous. I'm pretty much the outer limit of diversity around here, so the only exposure most of them have to other cultures is from American television, which isn't exactly a beacon of enlightenment. I've had a Chilean ask me if lots of black people live in the city because they can't sell as many drugs in small towns. It's hard to know how to answer questions like that. "No," doesn't seem like enough.

On a completely different note, the TV just told me a funny joke. Q: Why don't southern girls like orgies? A: Because of all those thank you notes they have to write afterwards!