I cannot believe that I’ve only been in Spain for less than 3 weeks. It truly feels like 3 months. Thinking of working at Clyde’s or sitting around with my parents watching TV at night seems like an eternity ago.
This week was pretty good. I officially started at the high school, but most of the teachers weren’t really ready for me, so I didn’t have to go to all of my classes. The ones I did go to were basically just the students interviewing me…”What’s your favorite movie?” (“Oh, I like all movies, I couldn’t possibly pick”), “Do you like Spanish food” (“Yes! Except for pig ear. Yuck”), “What do you miss from your country” (“Aw, my friends and family”)…but then there were some weird questions…”What is your favorite holiday resort?” (“Um, Disney World?”)“Do you want a Spanish romance?” (“No comment”) and finally “How old are you?” and when I said “22” they said “Woah!” as if I had just said I was 122. This is going to be an interesting year. I also had a one-on-one session with one of the P.E. teachers to help him plan out his lessons and to learn English vocab. Neither of us really know gym vocab words in our respective second languages though, so the hour consisted of us demonstrating squats, sit-ups, monkey bars, hopscotch, and countless other P.E. activities to each other in order to figure out what we were talking about. I think that is going to be one of my favorite classes of the week.
Private lessons are also going well. I’m only working 12 hours a week at the high school, but I’m also teaching 13 hours of private lessons a week. I like being busy and prefer it to sitting on my couch, watching TV all day…but 13 hours is going to be a lot. With most of the kids I either work with their school textbooks or make up some weird version of 20-questions or hangman to teach them vocab words. This week though, I started with one family where I teach a 9-year-old boy for 30 minutes and his 16-year-old sister for the other 30 minutes. Neither of them knows English very well at all. With the boy, we sat on the floor for half an hour, me speaking English to him and he responding in Spanish and not even coming close to answering any of my questions. We mainly talked about how strong Superman is and how Spiderman is super cool. Then with the girl, I couldn’t really have a 16-year-old playing tic-tac-toe with vocab words, so for the entire time we just sat and talked about movies, music, and boys. Again, me in English and she, for the most part, in Spanish. A lot of the parents here have a little bit of false hope when it comes to their kids. If your kids don’t know English, don’t expect them to succeed in a conversation class with a native speaker…
On the social side of things, this weekend was much calmer than the last (San Miguel). Thursday night, Mamen and I went out to dinner with two of her friends, and then she and I went to a bar called “El Abuelo.” While there, I met Navalmoral’s fourth auxiliar, a girl from Northern Ireland named Jessica. She and I made plans to hang out in the next day or two.
Saturday night, Jessica and I ended up getting tapas for dinner. Meeting at 9.00pm, we ate at the restaurant until 12.30am. I would say we’re getting used to the Spanish schedule and the sobremesa tradition. After that, we met up with two friends for botellón, then made our way to Boulevard (the closest thing to a disco here…but it’s still a long shot from actually being one). Boulevard was a sight to behold. It was about 75% men and of those men, about 75% of them were over the age of 35. It was a great people-watching place though. I definitely picked up some sweet dance moves from those grandpas. My favorite of the evening was the “driving the car” move. Classic.
So after a bit, we checked out to Boulevard and turned in for the night. It was about 5.30am when I got home, but I was pretty awake and didn’t end up sleeping until 6.30 or 7.00ish. I ended up sleeping until about 1.00pm today, which is huge for me. I usually hate sleeping that late, feeling like I’m wasting the day. But it’s pretty impossible to waste a Sunday here…everything is closed and no one is out on the streets. It’s now almost 5pm and I’m still in my glasses and pajamas. I’ve done a load of laundry, read my Kindle on my balcony, but mostly I’ve just been a bum all day. I’m looking forward to this week and getting into my full swing schedule. I so graciously volunteered to guest speak at a teacher’s class on Tuesday morning about the American revolution and American government (the kids are learning about it), so I should probably Wikipedia some things today so I know what I’m talking about. As long as they don’t ask me questions, it should be fine. I haven’t taken a history class (about America) since high school, so we’ll see how it goes…
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