In Chile

So after all that rigormorole I’m here in Chile! I arrived on Friday, it is now Sunday. Friday I was too beat to do anything so I rested up and stayed in for the night. The host of the hostel, Pato, is really friendly, he helped me access the ATM machine which I couldn’t figure out to do…damn “foreigner” button which I’ve never had to use before. After that he invited me out to coffee with him and his friend Angie. I started telling them about my experience in Spain, and he told me never to mention Spain in Chile, that there’s still a lot of bad blood here regarding Spain. He was really sensitive about that. I’m not sure if it’s all Chileans or just him, but he seemed to be easily offended and his humor was really passive-aggressive. So I spent all day Saturday walking around the city, I must have logged about ten miles on foot, I bought a cell phone and by chance I found the Burford Institute where I should be having an interview at some point in the near future. I’m going to go directly there tomorrow to ask for a job in person. I ran into some nice people in the city, too. A lady approached me and asked where I was from and why I was here, she told me of a good institute to find work teaching English. A lot of people have commented on how good my Spanish is, but I think they are just want to say something nice to the "Gringo". The lady told me that I will also have to look out for the girls here, that they are going to love me haha, I guess time will tell. I came back and was invited along for dinner and drinks with an Ausie, a New Zealander, Scotsman and an Irish girl…it was all great fun. We went out to this big restaurant in Barrio Brasil they had all kinds of great meats, I had some type of lamb pot-roast and it was absolutely delicious. The place was huuuge and there was a stage up front where they had live music, the Chileans were all up dancing and having a great time. In the middle of the night, the band stopped playing and a chubby guy dressed in black got on stage with a headset microphone. The music then got crazy and he was dancing around like some crazed, fat, aerobics instructor. He was shouting out comands like "mano derecha, mano izquierda" and the whole restaurant was doing everything he said and they were loving it...Chileans...go figure.

I had a lot of fun with my four new friends from around the world…they told me important things like what a "jap’s eye" is. we all drank a few beers and had a lot of laughs, talked politics and exchanged jokes. They were 32, 31, 29 and 28, I was by far the youngest out at 23, but they didn’t mind at all, we all had a good time. The Irish girl dragged her Kiwi boyfriend up to the dance-floor to help my transition onto the dance-floor easier to go dance with a gorgeous chilean dressed in pink. Good times, good times.