Two Jobs

I started my second job last week at Yamanya Hostel. It's a pretty new hostel of about 4 months and I am delighted to be working there. I am working for the tour agency under a guy named Carlos who is a lot of fun. My first day of work consisted of going on a walking tour of Cusco with him and guests of the hostel. It was great and I learned a lot about certain shops I had never been to before. My job mainly consists of translating itineraries at this point. Our goal is to get everything into a similar format so that it is nice and presentable in the binder. Since we work with a bunch of different agencies we have lots of different brochures and formats so it is important that we make it cohesive and with correct English grammar. I am working with a French girl named Clem who is in charge of PR. Once a document is translated and proofread, I send it to her to put into a pretty PDF format with the Yamanya logo and colors etc. After I am finished doing all this I will be working with clients and helping them get set up on a tour that they want.

One of the perks of working for a tour agency is that I get to try out things such as rock climbing for free. This past weekend I took my roommate Erica, a coworker Cameron and her mom rock climbing with this guy Alex who is the climbing instructor for Andexplora, a company we work with now. It was absolutely amazing and such a great experience. After we were done climbing what was definitely not a beginner route, we headed over to this ruins where there were caves all over the place. I took a video and will post it on youtube soon. It was an excellent day and I was very sore afterward. Rock climbing is awesome. I am going to see if I can do some more. Erica has already gone twice with Alex again.

So, needless to say, I have not had too much free time to get a post in since Thanksgiving. Fortunately, today was a holiday so we had no class. Gotta love the virgin Mary for having an immaculate conception and thus giving me the day off teaching. I am getting really excited because Christmas is around the corner which means my trip to Ecuador is around the corner too. I only have one full week of classes to teach this month which is pretty cool. December has already been flying by. It helps to not have to get up until 7am this month. I know that is going to change again next month but at least at that point I will only have two months left to get through before finishing at Maximo. I really like working there but I think I am going to be more than ready for something new when I am done at the end of February. My plan at this point is to stay in Cusco until I find out whether I get the job I am applying for. It's called The Experiment in International Living Abroad. It is a summer program for high school students to go abroad from 4-6 weeks and get an immersion experience. There are different tracks but I definitely am putting down that I would like to take my kids to Ecuador or Peru since I have experience in both countries. I think it would be the perfect job for me and from what I hear, they will fly me back to the states and then back to South America when I am finished. That would be perfect. If I get the job then I will head to Chile at the end of my time with them in August. If I don't get the job I will head to Chile in May. I want to go to Santiago and definitely to Valparaiso for a little while too. Traveling and teaching is the way to go. 6 months here and 6 months there. I might just work my way all around South America stopping for 6 months at a time in each place. I am A OK with this plan.