Wednesday 11 July 2012

Chile Confirmed

Santiago
Today I finalised all my arrangements for Chile: I will be working at Redland School, in Santiago, as a teaching assistant from August until December. The school is an independent British school, and is in the Las Condes area of Santiago, to the east. Las Condes houses many of the foreign embassies and big companies, and is the face of the new, modern Chile, and as such is really safe and pleasant to be in.

The school will provide me with accommodation and some pocket money, and my job will be just like language assistants in the UK: to speak English with students in order to help them with oral fluency and general language skills. I'm really looking forward to doing this, as it'll be a great break from University and a really different environment.

Booking flights is going to be the most expensive part of the trip, with prices around the £800-£1000 mark!

Patagonia "has some of the most dramatic lanscapes on earth"
Whilst I'm in Chile I'm really keen to travel as much as I can. Chile itself is very diverse, because of it's weird shape, but this also makes it very difficult to travel internally. The rail network isn't great, and it seems that its either the cheap and slow option (buses) or the fast and expensive (air) if you want to get around. Valparaiso looks really interesting, and so does the Central and Southern areas of the country. Chile's share of Patagonia is said to be completely different to Argentina's, and is much less populated and developed.

Chile also shares an absolutely huge border with Argentina, stretching all the way down the Andes, and I'd like to visit some places just across the border, as well as further into Argentina itself (Buenos Aires...?). Also, if I have the time and money the rest of South America is tantalisingly close!

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