Turns out, Chile is a foreign country. Who knew?

Actually, I expected that Chile would be an entirely different country from the U.S. but I wouldn’t have known that from the not-so-helpful advice from many of my fellow Americans.

As a public service, let me tell you that these two pearls of wisdom I heard over and over before I left the U.S. are complete bullshit:

a) Everybody speaks English. It’s the international language.

b) Maybe not everybody speaks English, but all the educated, professional people you’ll need to interact with do.

Okay, all of you educated Americans — and you Canadians that don’t live in Quebec — raise your hand if you had 2,3 or 4 years of a foreign language in high school and/or college.

Now, keep your hand up if you could actually give a technical sales presentation, interview someone for a developer position or read the incorporation papers for your new company in that language.

Ha, just as I expected, no one has their hand up except for Diana in the back there whose parents both just happen to be Mexican.

Various official estimates of how many people speak English range from 2–5% of the population.

The obvious solution to this, if you are me, is to become fluent in Spanish. So, on Thursday, I’ll be doing…