I do work here, honest!

Contrary to what some people appear to believe I am actually working here in BA. Apparently because there are currently no pictures of BA on my facebook some of you have your doubts that I’m even in BA and think I’m just gallivanting about the country and making weekend trips to Uruguay (because that IS documented on facebook and facebook is of course the law – if it’s not facebook official it’s not official after all. What crap. If you ask me, we (and I do include myself in this) should all stop wasting so much of our lives on facebook and go out and experience the real world some more. But you didn’t so I’ll move on.)

Anyway at risk of falling into the narcissistic trap of using this blog to go on about myself (which is not my aim)or as a vent for nothing more than mundane ramblings I will briefly account for my actions the last few months. I arrived with nowhere to stay and no plans other than “find a job so I can afford to eat”. Actually I lie, I did have a bit more of a plan than that, it was more like “find a job that pays well enough that I can afford to eat steak…a lot.” So anyway I’ve ended up living with said Argie at-first-strangers-now-friends of the long winded connection sort.

I work for an IT company in the rather nice but far too expensive to buy my lunch there part of the city that is Puerto Madero, the harbour. The company is expanding to do more business in the US and hopefully Europe so wanted someone to translate stuff from Spanish to English, proof read existing material in English and do an English version of their website. Proofreading technical IT manuals is not exactly the highlight of my day but perks are my hours are flexible so I can pretty much turn up and leave when I want, I work from home some days, speak Spanish in the office, get paid and It’s not quite full time so I have time for other things such as…

The English classes that I teach. A couple a week to some of the guys who work for the IT company and some for another company that just wanted a native speaker to give conversation classes to its staff. The rest of my week/weekend after that is made up doing touristy stuff around the city (museums, markets, sightseeing, the odd day trip out to the provinces to escape the city, mate in a park or coffee with friends, prep for classes, intercambios (language exchanges) with a few of my Argie friends, frequenting the odd milonga or tango class, going to the theatre, a bar or boliche etc. It’s a hard life.

I looked into various volunteer work things as well but had to wait till I knew how much time my job and classes would take up then either bureaucracy stuff didn’t work out or I now can’t dedicate enough time to it as I’m leaving for Peru in a month. Bit annoyed with myself about that but there we go. (Failing to volunteer I mean not going to Peru). The deal with Peru is I’ve decided to go back to Pisco where I did some volunteer work 3 years ago after the earthquake and visit the families we lived with, see some old friends and visit the previous projects we worked on. It means this last month in BA is going to be a little crazy as I have to do extra classes and work to make up for the fact I said I’d still be here for the whole of June but it’ll be worth it! VERY excited to be going back to Peru. :D So, next blog entry could well be about Peru rather than Argentina but at least you now know that I really am here!