The Next Step

So my parents and brother have left, gone back to the US. My brother left me with two hours of spanish lessons so I´m trying to figure out what to do. I´m beginning to reailize that my abilities have become really advanced, and aside from simple review, there really isn´t a whole lot more to learn in the grammar part of it. RIght now, even though I speak well, I just need to continue to use it. I need to keep developing my vocabulary and my comfort with using some of the complex sentence structures in speech. For this reason I think it´s goo that I´m at the end of my trip. I´ll have a seven more weeks to continue with my progress and then when I get back I´ll reevaluate what my options are. At this point I have a few general ideas for what I could do to continue improving my spanish and to give me time in South American countries while at the same time reverse the trend in my bank account.

While the opportunity is definitely there, I am not sure I would want to be an English teacher. It would definitely give me time to be in a cool place like Pichilemu. But I would like to be in an environment where I´m speaking more spanish than english.

With the burgeoning wine countries of Chile and Argentina, the opportunities to work with the wineries would provide a good opportunity to give me time in South America and BAck home. Unfortunately, the ideal job would be being a buyer and I lack the palate to do this. The more likely of this would be to be a guide at a South American winery, but that would probably mean that I would be speaking mostly english and I would be away from home for the whole year. Ironically this field is something I grew up hating due to the fact that my old man and his cronies would gather around a bottle of wine and talk about it like it´s a person.

Spanish television has become big in southern California and it would be really cool to be involved in something where I would probably be dealing with an array of accents and dialects in spanish. And because I have background working for advertising I could probably get a job starting somewhere. However, there probably would not be too much room for travel though as it would likely be something on set and pretty stationary.

Because of the size of the hispanic work force, Construction would be another good option. It would allow me to be outside and using spanish. Unfortunately I have very little experience (by that I mean zero) with construction so I would probably have a hard time getting a job.

A dream job of mine would be to work with the Dodgers in the scouting department and some sort of scouts assistant. I would get to travel around Latin America, talking baseball and checking out places like the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Colombia (all of which have coastline, so surfing could be done). And when I come back I´d be back in LA with the dodgers. However I get the feeling that to get in the sporting world you need to have some sort of connections or to have played the sport to get in. Maybe that´s just a misconception, but I´m definitely going to at least give that a look.

A spinoff of that would be to work for ESPNDeportes and pray that I didn´t have to work in Bristol, Conneticut. There would probably be less travel though and If I ended up in Bristol I would only be able to last a year at the most.

Probably the most ideal would be to work as an international rep (probably starting as an assistant) for a surf company (like Quiksilver/Body Glove/Rip Curl/Billabong/Hurley) and that would get me tons of time in South America, around the surf and free or cheaper gear.

I guess it´s really up in the air at this point, but at least I´ll be coming home with some ideas of what could be possible. I´m sure that there are other areas in which spanish is needed so I´m just going to keep my head up and my eyes open for what´s next.