Spanish, work and accomodation

Captain's log: startdate 30101.5

So it's been a week since I last posted. Stuff has happened. We found out on Saturday that for visa reasons we would only be able to stay in the country until early January, rather than end of March as we had previously hoped. We can only be in the country for 90 days per calendar year as tourists. We were assuming that this meant Jan - Dec. So if we did a border run around new year, we could get another three months. Further research suggests that a "calendar" year means 365 day period from when you enter the country. (Note this is not based off official Bolivian law, but someone else's interpretation of it). So yeah that was kind of annoying.

Amy decided to apply to work with a charity here called sustainable bolivia, which is an umbrella NGO that is partnered with around 30 other NGOs which do various things. SB's role is to place foreign volunteers into appropriate positions, sort out volunteer housing and visas (if needed) and what not. I also had a look at this, but all the NGOs that looked interesting to me required upper intermediate Spanish, which I don't have yet. So instead of applying for something, I found that they also offer one on one Spanish lessons for 50Bs an hour if you do 20 hours in a week. I inquired about this, and on Monday I started. Amy decided that if I did this I might get better at Spanish than her, and so she also did this. It worked out to be £100 each for 5 days of 4 hours a day, with our last lesson today. My Spanish has improved vastly, although it's still got a long way to go.

When we arrived there for our first lesson on Monday, we got chatting to an English guy Alex who is a director for SB. We had a quick chat with him before our class started, and agreed to have a longer chat on Wednesday. In the Wednesday chat, we mostly discussed Amy's application, and then he asked me what I was thinking. I explained that my language wasn't good enough yet, but was working on it, and mentioned my ~10 years of circus experience, at which point he got quite excited, since the charity that Amy is probably going to work for (at least to start with) is performing life, which teaches street kids circus, drama and music skills. So yeah we're having a meeting with the director of that charity next week to see whether Amy and I will both fit in.... so yeah I might have managed to find a job.

The downside is that SB asks for $350 a month each for a bed in a shared room in one of their shared houses, or $550 a month for a home stay program. We however have a friend who lives here and rents an entire apartment for $400 a month, additionally I mentioned in an earlier post that we met a Bolivian lady who had lived in the US for 33 years, and had a friend who rented rooms out. So when we talked to Alex about this, he said that SB does allow volunteers to sort their own accommodation and in that case only charges $150 a month each. Half of that is returned to us to spend on the charity we work for, the rest goes towards funding SB. So tonight after our final Spanish class we met up with this lady's friend (I think it's her cousin) and negotiated a deal with her. We now have a room in a house with a Bolivian couple and their two kids (aged 30 and 31) in the north of the city. We will be paying 2000Bs a month which is a bit less than £100 each, and we move in on Sunday.

Finally I've spent most of my spare time this week (which has not been that much since the lessons, meetings and homework have taken up a lot of time) going through some openGL tutorials: http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/ and learning how to use Blender (3D modelling software). This is in preparation for starting work on my knitting simulator. It's quite fun, and pretty easy, way easier than I remember from when I worked with openGL v1. I can now take a 3D model created in Blender, texture map it, create minmaps and compress the texture, and then import the object as a .obj and display it with the texture, whilst it rotates a bit. Not all that exciting, but pretty cool.

So yeah it's been a busy but highly productive week. We'll see what happens with work and how well we get on with our new landlords next week.

Hasta luego!