Life in Chile, 2 years later....
It's been a very long time since I last wrote in this blog. A combination of factors caused me to stop writing, the biggest two being the long working hours here and the slow internet connection. But my two year "Chile aniversario" is coming up this week, and it's made me think about my time here.
So what have I been doing these last two years? Mostly working and traveling whenever I got the chance. As I said, working hours here are long- especially during the first 6 months when I was working for an institute. Life as an institute teacher means strange hours- you teach mostly business professionals, so classes can be spread out throughout the day from very early in the morning to very late at night. It's an exhausting schedule, but on the plus side you do get to meet a lot of interesting people. I taught classes at a big newspaper office, the national TV channel, to business executives, etc.
But I was lucky to find a job teaching general English at a university soon after arriving, and that's what I've been doing ever since. It's been a great experience and I've really learned a lot from it. The university I teach at, Pontificia Universidad Catolica, is considered the best in Latin America and the students there are very hard-working and motivated. They're really fun to teach and they've taught me a lot about Chilean culture. Some of them even call me "Maura-sensei" because of the stories I've told them about living in Japan.
Working at a university is hard, our semesters are four months long and during that time I don't have much free time. But fortunately I do get month-long breaks which I can use to travel. I've been able to take some amazing trips here, mostly to the south - I visited the "middle south" a year ago, and this year in February I spent about three weeks in Chilean and Argentinian Patagonia.
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| At Perito Moreno Glacier, in Argentinian Patagonia |
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