I thought this would be easy.

It seemed simple enough. 74 people in the program. Two fantastic coordinators. Thousands of empty apartments in this city just waiting to be inhabited. It should have been simple.

Of course, things are never so simple.

We had four options. 1. Live by yourself in a small furnished apartment. 2. Live with fellow teachers you meet in the program. 3. Live with Chileans of a similar age in their apartments. 4. Live with a Chilean family.

All have their own merits and appeal. Lord knows I love alone time. But in a strange country, I don’t think I’d like to be alone, so maybe I’d live with teachers. Most sought to improve their Spanish by living with Chileans their own age, and the bonus to livingg with a family is that they might include your meals in rent.

But I was terrified of living with Chileans. My schoolgirl knowledge of Spanish has a tendency to petrify me here–at least it did in the beginning, before being forced to deal with this and other situations. So in the beginning, I wanted to live with teachers.
And they, all having a better grasp on Spanish and the desire to become even more fluent, sought to live with Chileans.
I didn’t stress at first. I figured something would work out. I sent e-mail to apartments I found with multiple languages spoken, translated into Spanish using the magic of Google Translate. I never heard a response. But, I had a month in the hostel. Something would work itself out.

Then my friends started to go look at apartments. They’d come back with reports of great apartments, interesting people, and a gripe here or there about the place. It didn’t seem like they were quite ready to leave.

Then they started moving out. After one, two, three apartment visits, they’d found the perfect place, the perfect situation.
Once, the place of overflowing with people from the program. We’d congregate on the patio, tell stories of our adventures and our days teaching, we’d drink, go out, stumble back together — the place really belonged to us.

But soon, the crowd started to thin. The staff jumbled us around, cramming us into different rooms to make room for other guests — guests not associated with our program. Guests who never heard of TeachingChile. Guests who didn’t even speak English. Foreigners, to me anyway. In every sense of the term.

I began to intensify my search. I started searching and e-mailing every day, first for an hour or so — then every free minute would be on apartment websites.

Then I teamed up with a friend in the same boat, only she’d been looking as intensely as just was since day one. Together, we scanned every place we could with two rooms available, worked to make the e-mail sound better, even attempted to make a call or two.

Within a day of teaming up, we had our first apartment to look at.

A highrise right on Bernando O’Higgins, in the heart of Santa Lucia. The front was covered in vines, and the building felt like a forest. The apartments themselves, however, left much to be desired. Things like cleanliness, for example.

Next, we mad an appointment for a place in Bellas Artes. The apartment itself was fairly nice, and the owner and potential roommate was perfectly nice. The building, though, was old, dingy — it just wasn’t for us.

Amy went to look at the next one alone. In a more mechanical area of Santiago, just South of my school, she reported that it simply wasn’t a neighborhood we wanted to live in.

The fourth apartment itself was lovely. The walk from the Metro to the apartment, on the other hand, was not. It was long, and the hoots and hollers never ceased. On that street, there was no question that it wasn’t a walk we wanted to perform daily.

When we returned to the hostel, more friends were packing to move out, and several had already left. To our dismay, we found that is was only the two of us and one other couple who hadn’t yet found a place to live.

Finally, our coordinator sent us an e-mail with an appointment to see a place just a few blocks south of Santa Lucia. It was on the tippy top of our price range, but we didn’t really have any other options.

We were expecting another disappointment.

Instead, we moved out just two days later to the awesome place we’re now staying in. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms. Within walking distance of my work, several friends, downtown, and cheap cab distance from some of the best places to go out.

And now that I’m hanging out on the balcony of our ninth story apartment, looking out of Santiago, listening to the hum of traffic below me, I think it worked out perfectly. I’m just high enough that I have a great view, that I can feel and hear Santiago below me. But I’m close enough that I can see the faces, guess their stories, and giggle at their pants.

It’s a hard thing to do here in Santiago, just watch. Rather than watching and observing, which is my nature, I feel as if it’s watching me. I’m the foreigner here, the rubia in a sea of dark haired beauties. It makes me unconfortable, the stares as I walk by, the cries of love in broken English, the occasional glares. But from my perch, they can’t see me watching them.

Up here, I’m me. I can watch. I can observe. I can learn.