By DandyLion
¡Buenas tardes de Santiago!
Today was another beautiful day as spring is quickly approaching us! In fact, today I spent the afternoon riding around Santiago giving a tour of the city - which is what I am doing as my volunteer work here. Doing tours has proven to be such an entertaining, effective, and educational way to learn about the city better. For the past month, I have been learning the different routes that we take for the tours and the information that accompanies each, as the tours are also focused on learning about the city.
As it turns out, these have been my only really primarily challenging tasks at La Bicicleta Verde. Santiago is an enormous city which holds anywhere between 6 to 9 million people on any given day, due to commuting and residency differentials. Therefore, it is apparent that the city is rather large in terms of land mass and that it takes a while to learn the routes. Although Santiago, like DC, is a very organized city, there are some major differences that make travel significantly more complicated by foot or by bike. For example, many of the major streets here only permit you to cross on either the left or right side of the street, not all four sides of an intersection as we are given in DC. What this means is that if you need to cross from one corner of a street to the other, you need to be attentive as to where the sidewalks are located so that you don't accidentally cross to a side without a crosswalk and have to turn back! It's a bit complicated to learn the bike routes this way, but as the saying goes, with practice makes perfect, and soon enough I will learn them all indubitably.
The other major challenge is memorizing all of the history and information which I can share with tourists. Santiago has such a rich past - not to mention the present nor the future - but Santiago is not the only topic of which I need to discuss with customers! There are numerous landmarks that were, for instance, given as gifts from other countries to celebrate a specific occurrence in time because of whichever various historical contexts. We aim to discuss everything from parks to politics to culture to markets and so forth. Furthermore, every person has a different mind and therefore asks different questions depending on the direction in which the conversations that we have goes. Because of this, I constantly feel like I need to achieve practically an encyclopedic memory, which so far hasn't proven to succeed. However, I have been accompanying many tours with my fellow coworkers and being especially attentive so that I can learn the information better. Fortunately, the Spanish-English language barrier is not an issue!
I definitely feel like I am already making a difference with my company. This morning, for example, I translated a very important text from Spanish to English for the owners of my company who needed to send a very clear message of thanks to a group of English-speaking businessmen that recently took tours with LBV. In the office, I have been making various phone calls and responding to countless emails that are necessary to maintain the business as well as helping in the bike shop to organize the various equipment for tours. During the tours that I do, the tourists feel comfortable asking me questions about Santiago, which I can answer! I have also been able to give various recommendations for restaurants to eat at and activities for them to do based on my own personal knowledge and understanding of the current events in the city. It has proven quite rewarding.
Although there are always challenges, there are also always solutions, and I know I can continue to find them!
Until next time,
Danielle
