Cashed my first Chilean paycheck on Friday! And what a process it was ... ugh. Rushed home after work since the bank by my house is open until 4 (most close at 2) and found myself in a line literally 100 people deep. And in typical Chilean fashion, no one was moving all too quickly. At 4 pm on the dot a security guard locked the doors and wouldn't allow about 10 people to come in who had arrived just a few seconds too late. One gentleman was not having it, though, and spent the next 30 minutes yelling at the security guard through the glass and dramatically sliding his hands down the door. Didn't work out in his favor.
OVER AN HOUR LATER I finally got to the window, and after being fingerprinted and signing my paycheck in a couple really random places, I was handed a HUGE wad of bills ... definitely a little scary having to carry around all that money. Foreigners aren't allowed to open bank accounts (I don't fully understand why) so I guess I'll have to hide it all in my mattress every month?
We're paid 335,000 pesos every month - roughly $700 - but I think I'll be able to live pretty comfortably on that here ... or at least I will once I find an apartment. Brooke and I decided to stick around our "residencia" another month, thinking we would be paying 190,000 ($400), but the owner decided to surprise us and charge us 50,000 more pesos. I'm paying more here than I did for my apartment in Iowa City. RIDICULOUS. We have to supply our own sheets, pots and pans, and even toilet paper ... we're essentially paying $500 a month for a place to sleep.
So that leaves me with a whopping 95,000 pesos ($200) to live off of for the month. With about $30-40 of that going towards transportation and $20 for cell phone expenses, I'm going to have to get creative with budgeting for food and entertainment. Good thing pisco's only about $3 a bottle!
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