Not Dead Yet.

If you’ve read our previous posts, it would seem as if we had already moved out of the country. With a little shot of confidence we decided that we had to see this through and continue to try to find work. So we haven’t given up after all. In fact, we seem to be even more dead set on finding work.

The shot of confidence came at our darkest hour; we decided to call a friend from our TEFL course to see how she and her roommates were doing in their job searches. To our surprise, she had, in fact, been working for the past two weeks. She suggested we try the school she was working at and she knew of another that was hiring. Early Friday morning we went to Rome and followed up on her suggestions. Unfortunately, all of her schools teaching positions were full at the moment but the guy seemed certain that more hours would come available fairly soon. He also told us to lose our ‘anglo’ ways and be more aggressive when it comes to finding work in Italy; what seems annoying or pushy to us is just the way things get done here. Then we went to another interview and the woman told us that if she decided to hire us she would call by seven that evening. It goes without saying that the phone did not ring. That was a bit of a heartbreaker but we’ve got two more interviews next week and more applications to scatter throughout Rome. We’ve also decided to put up some flyers around Zagarolo for our services so hopefully more than a few people in town will be interested in learning English from us. I even applied at a pub in Rome; the bartender said the clientele is like 99 per cent English speaking, so my poor Italian wouldn’t make a difference.

In fact, while at that same pub we had a major moment of ‘Wow, it’s a small world!’ We met a couple of girls from Seattle, Kelly and Christine. Kelly was actually from Federal Way! They were both finishing up a month of studying Astronomy at the UW Rome satellite branch. We reminisced about all the great things about home and traded a few Rome war stories as well. It was fun to talk about home but it didn’t make us home sick; it really just made us want to succeed here even more.