Escalar y Otras Aventuras

So, due to a combination of me working 15 hours a day and Erin being extremely (extremely) lazy, we haven’t managed to write for a while. Turns out we’re getting really busy around here. Work is picking up like crazy, which results in a combination of relief (in the “not going to starve to death” way) and stress (in the “having a job” way). The most ridiculous aspect of the whole working thing is how we’ve somehow ended up with completely different working hours. Specifically, Erin has awesome hours, working between the hours of 10 and 3 just about every day, while I’ve basically gotten screwed, waking up at 6 and ending work at 9 in the evenings with a huge gap of nothing to do during the day but listen to the director’s stories of how she accidentally hired a pedophile one time. Amusing? Yes, but I’ve been instructed not to tell anyone else about it, so don’t mention it to anyone from Chile. Still, work is easy and we both really like our students, which makes even ungodly hours like mine relatively doable.

Also, we’ve managed to have a pretty fun week when not teaching English to businessmen on their lunch hours. On Thursday, Erin dragged me out to this club that was featuring drum music and dancers to meet with some folks. We decided to take the hour walk to the place to avoid paying for what turned out to be a $1.50 cab ride on the way home and got there incredibly late, long after the rest of our group had arrived. Still, when we arrived, the music was passable and the company was excellent. We ended up meeting a Chilean dude named Jose and his Kiwi girlfriend, Louise (which the Chileans think is hilarious, because Luis a guy’s name here). Jose is something of a climber, and we mentioned we were planning on going to Cajon del Maipo this weekend to do some climbing. Jose offered to go along and show us around, which turned out to be a really great thing. Once I started falling asleep at the table, Erin agreed to head home.

On Friday, we weren’t planning on doing anything, but we got a call from our TEFL teacher, James, asking us if we wanted to go and help his new graduates celebrate. We did, and we did. It was an awesome time. We ate delicious Thai food, drank beer, met James’ Chilean girlfriend, and discussed bathroom etiquette. There were also Marlboro Cigarette representatives giving out free, incredibly ugly baseball hats (which of course we all wanted). All you had to do was watch a movie displayed through 3D glasses. First they asked if we smoked, and we all replied no. They then informed us that we couldn’t watch the video, because they weren’t allowed to encourage non-smokers to start. I quickly corrected my mistake, admitting that I’d been smoking for years and years, and they agreed to let me watch. The video, it turns out, was just giant, 3D packs of Marlboro cigarettes floating through space over a western landscape (and not worth the effort), but they let me play a matching game afterwards, and once I won I received a hat that will no doubt make me 100% more attractive to the ladies. Watch out.

Yesterday, we went climbing. We got up early and met Jose, Louise, and their friend Jorge (another Chilean, who Erin claims was attractive despite the fact that he looked nothing like me) to go to Cajon del Maipo, a valley nestled up next to the Andes that’s home to most of the area’s outdoor activities. After an hour on the metro and bus, followed by a fifteen minute walk, we found out that the area we wanted to go to is completely unreachable, since to get to it you have to cross private land, owned by people that don’t want you crossing their land. This is when we realized how lucky we were to have met Jose and his friends, because while we (and by we I mean Erin) would have sat down and cried and then headed home, they informed us that there was another place nearby we could go to that was almost as good. Problem solved. This place, too, lay on the other side of private land, but whereas the first place denied us access, this one only wanted four dollars apiece to cross. We decided not to pay and instead opted for a one and a half hour trip around via a nearby river (in Chile it is against the law to block access to rivers) that would lead us to the spot. It was an incredibly fun walk. The water was a nice temperature, and the land was incredibly beautiful. After about an hour and a half, we came to a spot in the river that seemed impassable (at least without being fully submerged, which doesn’t mesh well with rock climbing gear), but we tooled around for a little while and finally managed it, arriving at the rocks 5 minutes later. I wish we hadn’t been robbed twice, because then we’d have pictures of the place we ended up at. It was a collection of two or three 50-60 foot boulders right next to the river, which was crystal-clear, surrounded by green forests, with the snow-capped Andes visible through the river valley. If I was rich, it’s what my bathroom would look like. It was by far one of the most beautiful spots we’ve ever been. We ate, climbed all day until we were tired, then bought empanadas at a shop on the trip out. It was an awesome day.

That brings us to today. We haven’t done anything of note, but we are planning on having a couple folks over for another asado. And you know what that means. More choripan. Delicious. Hope everyone is doing well.