Something that I’ve been waiting for for a long, long time finally happened today. As I was walking down the street in downtown Santiago, one of those flyer-people approached me and pressed a small piece of paper into my hand.

I’m not a big fan of the flyering, as it’s wasteful and generates a lot of litter, but I usually take one anyway, figuring that the giver-outer probably gets paid more if they give more out, and though I probably don’t want the thing in question, it’s a pretty terrible job to hand on the street and give out flyers, and if the person had the chance, they’d probably get a better job. Plus the flyers can be picked up by the cartoneros (recycling guys) who also make a small amount of money, so in the end, it’s a small economic strategy that I have, this flyer-taking.

But the flyer I received today was the flyer I’ve been waiting for since I moved to Santiago. It’s the one that offers me English classes. That’s right, I’ve got a flyer which invites me and a friend to a no-sign-up-fee English class with a “scholarship discount” (what? that doesn’t make sense in Spanish either, unless they’re trying to distinguish it from a full scholarship).

Sad to say, I will not be taking the Escuela de Idiomas Alameda up on their smashing offer to teach me through their “learning system” which they say is personalized, dynamic, quick, effective and doesn’t require language labs. But I will forever (or at least for a long time) enjoy the fact that the woman who handed me the flier (number fourteen, it would appear, from the tiny 14 written in the corner) was so into her job that she didn’t notice that I was wearing baggy capri pants and running shoes and have, you know, that face that says, my people, they are not from here.

Let me know if anyone else is interested, I can give you the flyer or tell you the corner to stand on to get a copy of your own. Don’t worry, it pictures the requisite happy smiling Euro-people looking at a laptop. But don’t worry, there are no language labs. No Europeans either, I’d bet.