I’m surprised by the amount of
truth in the wisdom I was given by my dad before I left the states (such truth
is best solidified through personal experience:
“Crap, he was right!”). This
truth is that I was to learn a tremendous amount about those things that I
could never possibly have expected to learn about. I expected that I would, eventually, get to
know my future English students in the business realm on a personal level,
maybe even become friendly with them.
Who knows, maybe some of them would like me enough that they would
remember me later on when I asked for a work reference. You never know, right? At this point, this particular expectation
that I held has not proven to be impossible, nor has it exactly bloomed to its
full potential.
On the other hand, I’m making great
friends with the receptionists. Being a
travelling English teacher, my routine is growing quite regular: I go to the receptionist of the business for
whom my student(s) work(s), recite my name, passport number (because according
to the Chilean government, I’m not recognizable as a person yet, but am fully
entitled to pay 20% in taxes), who I’m teaching on that particular day, and
agree to wait while said student(s) is/are paged. After several weeks of this, the
receptionists to whom I give this information and I have come to an unspoken
understanding that the whole process is a mild pain in the ass. In accordance with this agreement, we are
able to socialize. The usual topics
include where I’m from, why I sound like a Spaniard, complaining about
co-workers, etc. During my most recent
socialization hour, a security guard for one such company who lived in Miami
for 30 years told me that he understands the economic possibility that awaits
the Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Hondurans, Colombians and other
Spanish-speakers who immigrate to the United States looking for work, but to
see a young American working in a Latin American country for his own economic possibility
was refreshing: “it makes me feel good,”
he said, “I don’t know why, but I really
like it.”
My routine has been made all that
much more enjoyable and convenient after moving into my new apartment. For a kid from a rather small town who
watches shows like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, and other shows depicting
yuppie characters and their big-city shenanigans, experiencing city-life is a
pretty big deal. I’m on the 8th
floor of a building that’s a block from a subway stop in Providencia, the Manhattan of Santiago. I
live a block from my gym, and the first floor of the very building across the
street contains a bar, a 24hr liquor store, an OK Market (7-11), 4 restaurants
(one of which is rumored to be Santiago’s best family-owned empanada shop), and
a bakery. The view from my balcony is of
the Santiago sky-line, including the Costanera Center, the tallest building on
the South American continent. There
pigeons outside my bedroom window right now.
My room is rather small, only 6 inches away from being my stretched arm’s
width apart (I measured), but it is quite comfortable and equipped with a new
mattress, T.V. and cable, and surprising amounts of storage space. Need I say more?
Yes. I share house with two other guys, one
financial administrator (I think) for a mining company and the other, a doctor
and director of a small out-patient medical center. I have agreed to start teaching private
English lessons to the former, while the latter is fluently bi-lingual already,
having studied medicine for a short time at a school in Great Britain. With these two fellows comes the vast social
circle of which they are a part, being shenanigan-prone, big-city yuppies
themselves. Therein lays a possible
solution to the piece of my puzzle that I am lacking, making friends. This weekend is scheduled with a welcome
fiesta, which I am certain I will report about soon.
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