Teaching en Santiago de Chile

(Friday, 06 April 2012)
Note: I originally wrote this blog entry for my old Spanish school in Australia (The Spanish Cat), hence the error in the date above. 

Hello!

Santiago Centro

Well I´ve been in Santiago for exactly one month now. After my Amazon adventures it felt a little strange arriving into the hustle and bustle of a big city, but after the initial shock of civilisation and the crazy Chilean Spanish accent I´m loving my time here amongst the Andes.

What is Santiago like?

Andes View

Santiago is a really nice city and the views of the Andes never disappoint. What is cool about this city is that it is not a huge tourist destination, so you really get to spend your time in the local Chilean culture and people are always interested to hear about where your from and know a little bit about you. The people here love to play music; at every BBQ, drinks or event I go to everyone takes their guitars, bongos, tapping sticks or whatever other instrument you can think of and share company playing music and chatting, this has been really cool for me as I play guitar and love to share in this way. Even if you don´t play an instrument they will chime in with their voice.

Finding a job

This was not particularly hard! If you have a TESOL certificate here and are a native speaker most English Teaching institutes would love to hear from you. I found a job in my first week and am now taking roughly 10 classes per week with different students and always they are asking me to take more classes!

English Classes

Not a bad English class!

It´s been really nice taking classes with the students as I can see they are really interested to learn. Also sometimes in private classes the students take me to cool places around the city and even to restaurants just to talk and practice in English. Last week with one of my students we went to a great Italian restaurant here and then he drove me around the city to show me some of the sights only a local would know.

Enjoying my spare time

Lollapalooza

Amongst looking for a job, an apartment, getting used to the city and taking classes I have still had plenty of time to enjoy activities around the city like playing tennis, doing yoga, going to BBQs and student festivals and last weekend I went to the Lollapalooza music festival. This was a really great day, the most surprising thing for me was that you are not allowed to drink at music festivals here, at first I thought this was a bit of a bummer but it actually made for a really positive and cool environment. Families with children went along and the whole vibe of the day was really nice, also I got to see some great performances.

There were over 50 thousand people there!

Some street art near Universidad Catolica

City River