September 30, 2011

I just got back to Navalmoral from a few days spent in the main city of the region, Cáceres. Before I left, Monday and Tuesday were pretty normal. Tuesday I got to see the school I’ll be working at all year and meet a lot of the teachers. Everyone seems very nice and welcoming and the cafeteria has a coffee and bocadillo bar…so I’ll definitely like it there. Wednesday I got on the bus for Cáceres around noon, witnessed some old people fighting very passionately over who would sit in what seat, listened to a lot of music on my ipod, and two hours later, I was in the city. I went to check into my hostel, but it wasn’t ready yet, to I went to check out the Plaza Mayor and meet up with a few other auxiliaries from the program. After the awkward “I-think-you-look-American-and-like-the-person-I’ve-been-stalking-through-our-facebook-group” stare down, a few of us had some drinks and got to know each other. It was two auxiliaries’ birthdays that night, so a bunch of people had planned (through facebook of course) to meet up later for dinner and to go out.

I went back to my hostel, rested for a bit, talked to AppleCare for over an hour about my persistent internet troubles, and was back out in the Plaza Mayor by about 8.30pm. Again, meeting up with people was a huge guessing game because none of us had ever met before, but once we had our group together, we headed to 100 Montaditos (!), ate dinner, hung out, and then later a group of about six (as opposed to the 20 of us in the restaurant) went out dancing. It was definitely really nice to be out and be social. Until then, I hadn’t gone out in Spain since being back and it was really refreshing to be around people my age and making friends.

In the morning, I had to go apply for my N.I.E./T.I.E (Número/Identidad de identificacción extranjera) at the official foreginers’ office. It was just as time consuming and full of going to the office, leaving to make copies of stuff, going back to the office, leaving to go pay taxes, going back to the office…as everyone had told me it would be. But, at least that’s done and now I can open a bank account this week, then I’ll be able to finally get internet for my apartment.
After that excursion, I was in desperate need of a café con leche, so I headed over to the Plaza Mayor, had some breakfast and skyped my parents (free Wi-Fi in the plaza!). Some other auxiliaries met up with me and since we all had had to check out of our hostels early and didn’t have orientation until 5.00pm, we passed the time and bummed around the city for the rest of the afternoon. We toured the old part of Cáceres (cathedral, beautiful stone walls…), ate lunch in a park (I ordered a salad and received a bowl of salad dressing with a few lettuce leaves thrown in), and then took the bus over to the (huge) high school that our orientation was at. In typical non-Spanish style, we had arrived at 4.30pm, thinking we would be the first of the 80-some auxiliaries to show up…oh were we wrong. We were some of the last ones. Everyone was just standing around and since we were all basically there, the people in charge told us to get in groups of 5 and go find a room to sleep in (yes, dorms inside of the high school). It worked out perfectly that a group of 5 of us had been hanging out all day, so after some searching, we found a room, dumped our stuff, then were set loose in the main lobby to mingle with people for about an hour. It definitely takes a certain kind of person to do this program, so everyone was super out-going and we all made fast friends.

We then went into a small lecture room and after a very inefficient roll call/room number documentation (this is Spain, of course it was inefficient), we were given a crash course on everything Extremadura. Okay, see, a slideshow such as the one they gave us (all about the region, cities, food, people, agriculture…) would have been so helpful back in April when we were all assigned to Extremadura… However, we’re all products of the Wikipedia/Google generation and the one hour presentation didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. All of us were tired, hungry, and just wanted to be done with the meeting.

When the end was finally announced, we had about an hour to chill out in our rooms before dinner in the cafeteria. And oh, was dinner special. All of us gathered, lunch line style, and were served Dannon yogurt drinks, cold Spanish tortilla, two slices of tomato, some ham wrapped chorizo (didn’t even try this), and a piece of bread. It was basically prison food. Gross.
After dinner, we all got ready for the evening and a bunch of us took the 30 minute walk back into the center of town. Once there, we walked for a while before coming to a group decision to just go to any bar for a few drinks. That was a really fun time, as a few of us stayed inside (others were on the patio) and were served a bunch of free tapas with our drinks (made up for dinner, or the lack thereof). Some people left from there, but there was a HUGE botellón that night for Novetadas (pretty much hazing of the first year university students in Cáceres) a 10 minute bus ride outside of the center of town that some of us wanted to try to go to. Since it was already past 11.00pm and stores were closed, we went on a trip to try and find a Chino still open so we could get botellón materials. Once we did, it was almost midnight. We went to the bus stop, since the city government had extended the bus hours just to get people to this botellón, and were floored to see hundreds of Spanish students trying to get on the buses. The seven of us had a lot of debate as to if the botellón was worth all of the trouble and after a bit of discussion, decided just to sit in the park and chat with each other before we had to be back to the dorms before the doors were locked at 2.00am. Sitting and just getting to know each other was definitely the best decision. When we were ready to go, we ended up bumping into 3 other groups of auxiliaries and our group of seven turned into 20 or so again, and we started the walk back to our beds.

When my alarms went off at 8.00am, I didn’t want to get up at all. The night before in the hostel, I had slept maybe an hour and a half total (so many noises, awful bed), so all I wanted to do was sleep…but we had breakfast at 8.30am. We all got ready, went to breakfast, and after the last night’s dinner, I was in no way shocked to have cold churros, sickly sweet café con leche, and little crackers waiting for us. Again, we were all so tired and hungry still that the morning’s lectures/presentations were totally lost of us. After a lot of talk about what an auxiliar does (again, at this stage in the game, we know all of this), our mentors from our schools arrived. Oh my god, again with the inefficiency. I’ve been lucky enough to already know my mentor (Isabel), but a lot of people didn’t even know the name of theirs. Eighty-some of us were set loose among eighty-some mentors and told “just to find each other.” It was a mess. I didn’t see Isabel right away and knew she would probably be late, so just took a seat on a bench with another girl and waited. Ten minutes later, Isabel came in and she had a “let’s blow this joint” attitude, so we went to the cafeteria, also complete with coffee bar, and had a café con leche.

For the last hour, the mentors sat with us as there was a final presentation on how to get your N.I.E/T.I.E, open a bank account, and about medical insurance. Again, I was pretty zoned out, as I had already done/started most of that stuff. Isabel was kind enough to drive me back to Navalmoral with her. I just counted my 8 Euro loss on my roundtrip bus ticket, as she saved me an hour on the road.

I got back to my piso and completely crashed. Now, I’m just hanging out until the Fiesta de San Miguel activities start for the weekend. Apparently a ton of people are going to come here from other towns, it’s going to be really loud, and super crazy. Looks like I won’t be sleeping much tonight…