Nestle Chile

So, all my constant inquiries and unexpected pop-ins to the Institute's main offices have finally paid off - I have another new class.  I'm teaching a one-on-one business class at the Nestle Chile plant, out in Maipu.  The Nestle plant is relatively far away from Instead of coming to the Institute for his classes, I'm being sent to him.  This has lead to me having a little adventure of my own every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 11:00 to 12:00, while I am in transit.  Take a ride with me, won't you?

The day starts like most other days for me - with a ride on the Metro.  I take the Red line about 15 minutes to Estacion Central with about 20,000 of my closest friends.

Fortunately, when you ride the Metro at 11 am, you don't have to shove for a position on the train, or wait for multiple cars to pass by.  This is a standard capacity ride.

After I get to Estacion Central, once again I walk through the hordes of people, stores, and ice cream repositories to get to the bus terminal.  The walk looks like this:

Believe me, it takes all of my concentration to avoid purchasing some "shape-up" sketchers, or some new lingerie.
Once I reach the back of the station, I take an escalator up to the next level, where the bus terminal is.  I go to the "intercommunity" side of the bus station, and hop on a little "micro" that looks like this:

The bus itself is pretty cheap, and as it goes to the outskirts of Santiago, the clientele for these micros is often less than completely upstanding.  Combine that with Chile's baseline attitude of "We don't trust anybody", and this is what it looks like in front of most of these micros:

It's ok, though.  Before you start worrying about me, the midday clientele is really not that bad.  It's mostly other businessmen making a commute.  But from what I understand, I wouldn't want to be on one of these micros after 10 pm.

After about a 30 minute ride out on the micro, I get off right in front of this:

A closer shot of the sign in front:

Passing through the front gate here varies greatly from time to time.  Sometimes I walk through with hardly a check.  Other times I've been asked to open my bag, and show credentials.  Last time I went through, this lady was trying to give me a hard time about teaching an English class there, and demanded to see my credentials.  I don't really have credentials from my work, so I pulled out my US driver's license to show her.  She took it, wrote my name down as "Erik St. Market" (my old street address was under my first name), listed my driver's license number as my Chilean national Identification number, and wrote the name of my sponsoring institution as "Massachusetts".  Let's just say they're going to have some questions about this character should anything suspicious have happened last Wednesday.

But after getting through the main gate, it's just a short walk through Willy Won... I mean Nestle's establishment.  You can see often, the Oompa Loom... Nestle factory workers milling about, no doubt on break from their chocolate waterfalls and Golden Geese egg-laying rooms.

The student himself is probably one of the more difficult ones I've had so far.  He claims to have an advanced understanding of English, and wants to move very quickly through the book that he considers "demasiado facil".  Too bad for him, he's still making a ton of errors in this book that's supposedly "too easy", and he frequently reverts back to Spanish when he's unable to express himself fully.  He wants to give a presentation and meet people in January in Switzerland, so we're going quickly.  Unfortunately for him, he has a long way to go.  But we'll get there.

The ride back is equally as exciting.  The only difference is, while I'm waiting for a micro to pick me up to take me back into Santiago, I stare at this poster across the road:

Immovable hair?  Check.  Vague allusions to being on your side?  Check.  Power tie?  Double check.  I guess no matter where you go these days, politics still operate by the same governing principles.