last night i met another mechanical engineer at the hostel, who is also looking for a job in chile. compared to him, however, i’m setting my bar pretty high. he’s just out of school and doesn’t speak spanish, so he’s up for anything that pays money….whereas i’m looking for a creative engineering job (R&D, product development, etc.). apparently interviews can be pretty different here — at one place he’s been looking at, he’s completed 3 out of the 4 scheduled interviews….including one interview where they made him look at ink blots! apprently in all of them he saw a female anatomy part…but didn’t feel comfortable saying that, so he made stuff up every time, and it seemed to work, since he was called back.
he also recommended i visit universidad catolica (one of the three big universities in santiago). it was a great idea (i had been kinda lazy before), and my visits there and at universidad of chile were somewhat promising. i also met a british professor — it was interesting to hear from somebody with a different perspective of chile. for instance, just 30minutes prior, a mechanical engineering professor had told me that there was very little money for research here…so there’s not too much innovative stuff. the brit (a biochem prof), however, told me that there’s tons of money for innovative research…but most people here are conservative and do rather simple research.
for lunch, i continued the pizza hut world tour (started in cambridge, uk with roshan, christy and eric). pizza hut here is a bit of a dump (especially compared to american fast food chains in some other countries). but, they do sell fresh juice. today i risked it by having a mystery fruit called ‘frutillo’, which turned out to be strawberry. and fresa/frambuesa are rasberry in chile (fresa = strawberry in other countries).
at night, a few of us from the hostel went out. turns out one of the guys was some crazy brit who wants to be the next che. he was talking the whole night about how the world should be run by one big government, use no money, everything should be mechanized and assume that people will always do the right (i.e.– generous) thing.
