I just got back from a successful apartment hunt in Salt Lake City, and last night I stopped in Moab on the way back home. The place was chock full of European tourists, which I had not expected but which made sense once I saw it. What was more suprising was that the servers at both restaurants where I ate in Moab weren't native English speakers. This struck me as an odd coincidence, especially since I had noticed the same thing in Aspen a week before.

I dug around on the internet when I got back home and sure enough, it turns out that there's a government program allowing foreign university students to do seasonal work in the US during their summer vacations. There's also a whole slew of companies offering to pair these students with employers. While I'm not certain all my servers were part of this program, I'm guessing at least some of them were. The one thing I'm still trying to figure out is why I've never heard of anyone in Santa Fe participating in the program; Santa Fe has a very big need for seasonal hospitality workers, so I'd expect there to be some of these workers there. The program looks like it's been up and running since around 1999, but maybe Santa Fe employers just haven't caught on yet.