So why Poland?

Greetings! Several of you have been wondering the whys and hows of our recent Polish adventure. I apologize for not puting up this info earlier...but now you'll know!

Ever since the first night we met at Carlos Buhler's great slideshow about climbing all over the world, Jill and I have talked about living/working abroad. But we talked about it in passing the first year. The second year, as things were looking good for us, we started picking out schools and countries we were interested in, that were more or less safe, had decent access to the mountains, and would somehow have work that I could do, ideally legally!

Over the last winter, we were really aiming for South America! Jill joined an outfit called ISS, which is International School Systems. They're a headhunting group for all the international/American schools world-wide. You pay a fee, submit a resume, a head shot and a cover letter/philosphy note. Her info is then spread around their system, relative to what she's able to teach. At the same time, Jill is then able to see what schools might be hiring for x position for the coming Fall.

So the ball got rolling more seriously around New Year's, and in the spring she went to a huge ISS conference in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, this was a big secret that we were both keeping from work, and even family, at the moment. Since we didn't really know where or even if we were really going anywhere, then why tell? Plus, we'd only been together 1.5 years or so...were we ready for such a committment to each other?

So Jill goes to San Fran, and enters this huge conference, literally filled with the world's people! You walk in, and there in front of you is every continent represented. Jill was like, 'Wow, I could work there, or there, or there, or..." Fortunately, the night before she left, we went over what schools were going to be there, what was supposedly available and where would we both be happy. We made a rough top-ten list. (Hmm, I wonder if we have that still lying around somewhere?) Since South America was our original destination of choice, we focused on the school's with the best pay, benefits and- location.

Unfortunately, there are two of these conferences held in the US each Spring-NYC and SF. Usually NYC has the European and African schools dominating there's, and SF has eastern Asia, South Pacific and Central/South America. However, Chile and Argentina had gone to NYC. Bummer. Santiago would have been great! So, the two best schools we found were both in Venezuela, one of which was Valencia, a bit closer to their mountains and impressive waterfalls. There were other schools in Ecuador and Bolivia, but the packages were pretty lame (one of the main ideas behind this overseas adventure is to make US wages in a 2nd or 3rd world country...hence saving/paying off bills back home!)