back in españa

Today I walked into the teacher's lounge and I was a bit shocked at what I saw on the front page. The headline for the main story is "An average of 100 women report abuse every month in Córdoba." But that wasn't the shocking part.

Look at the women to the left. Notice anything strange? Well, apparently if you're Spanish, you won't notice anything in particular. I was a bit shocked to see half-naked women on the front page of a newspaper, then I remembered oh yeah, I'm in Europe. Still, isn't it kind of ironic that the women are protesting domestic violence but they're just out there lettin' it all hang out?

By the way, yesterday was the National Day Against Domestic Violence here in Spain. Apparently that involves outdoor interpretative dance in the nude?






Anyway, I'm back from my trip to Edinburgh, or in Spanish, Edimburgo. We got there on Thursday night and drove on the left side of the road (hooray UK) to our hostel to check in, then get food. We went to a traditional Scottish place and got some fish and chips or shepherd's pie or whatnot. Scottish food isn't really all that exciting, in my opinion. Two of the other girls really wanted to try haggis, but I wasn't all that thrilled about the prospect of eating sheep intestines, so I passed on that. We went to bed a bit early because Carole was still recovering from strep -- yes, strep. Two of the other girls, Corey and Steph, went out to see more of Grassmarket plaza, which was right by our hostel. I, for one, was ready to get out of the cold since it felt like the windchill would make the temp somewhere under freezing. Horrible.

We did our guided tour in the a.m. and went around the tacky tourist shops in central Edinburgh, too. The tour was helpful in teaching me about Scottish history, which I knew almost nothing about. It turns out that Edinburgh has a whole bunch of morbid stories from torture and witch trials and war prisons to serial killers who sold their victims to the medical college for money. Who knew? I also got to go on a nifty, nighttime underground tour of the creepy Edinburgh vaults. So creepy. Apparently there's paranormal activity down there, too, if you happen to believe in that hoohah. Either way, it was creepy to be down in some cold, wet, dark vault where there used to be rampant crime and death. The vaults were unknown for 150 years because they were boarded up. More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_vaults . Creepy.

Other stuff we did there was sample some real Scotch whiskey, see the Scottish parliament, see the Edinburgh castle, and do some general shopping. I managed to find a bookstore which was a welcome discovery. There are no English language bookstores near where I live, so it was nice to find some books to take back with me. Today I'm going to start reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, the same guy who wrote Blink, which I suggest you read if you haven't already. Last night I just finished Running With Scissors and that is a ridiculously weird book. I would recommend you read it if you have a strong stomach and aren't grossed out by some vulgar stuff. Pretty funny, too, though.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. It's kind of weird that I'll be spending the day in another country, but them's the breaks. I'm in charge of making apple pie for tomorrow, so I have to jump on buying those ingredients and looking up translations for the ingredients in Spanish. Fun stuff.

Other than that -- not much is new. Life is back to the grind for the next couple weeks until I go home for Christmas. I am going to Madrid with a couple girls in a few weeks, so that will be fun. Not much else to report.

OK I'm gonna go down to the little cafeteria and get some espresso (they just say café, but no, it is ESPRESSO to our American standards, thank you very much).

Back to school, back to school, to prove to dad that I'm not a fool...

...I guess song that doesn't exactly apply when I'm the profesora. Vale, no me importa.

Random observation: I find it a little strange that students here don't address the teachers at "Mrs." or "Mr." whatever, they just say "Maestr@" (teacher). Another thing: the "@" symbol denotes a masculine or feminine adjective or noun. I just thought about that because a student walked into the teacher's lounge and said that...

Today I don't have all that much to do other than conversation hours with teachers. I'm not going to the music class today because they have a test, so I'm just hanging out in the teacher's lounge. I'm lucky to have internet and a little café at my school, too, so I can relax while I'm not doing anything in particular. Today I've been looking at El País online, which is one of Spain's biggest newspapers. I have an enormous list of vocab just from reading up online.

The most helpful resource to improve my Spanish is chatting with the professors, especially the ones who are bilingual. Usually they will speak to me in Spanish, though, but that's good for me. I keep freezing up every so often and I can't think of even one sentence in Spanish...so frustrating. Good to know I studied Spanish for years on end and I still stress out about subjunctive verbs, especially when they're irregular or in any tense other than present. I really need to review subjunctive...I should have brought my Spanish grammar books with me to Spain. I'll have to get those when I go back to the US. Not to mention I'll have to bring a bunch of English books with me in order to teach it better for my tutoring classes.

Speaking of tutoring, yesterday I got two calls from the fliers I have been putting up. One call was from a lady who teaches at one of the language institutes here, and she was p.o.'ed that I put up a flyer for classes near her school. OK, lady, it's a public place and it wasn't like it was right on the door of the school or something really brash like that. Another call was from a lady who wants classes for her 8 year old daughter, but I was really distracted by the music playing at Mercadona (grocery store), so I have to call her back to talk about today. Tonight I'm going back to teach Marta and Paco, at seven.

I met other professors' children last weekend -- Beatriz invited me to go out with her and Daniela in the parque, and we ended up seeing Elvira and David with their daughter, Ana. So I got to play with little kids, which was a lot of fun.















I learned some new vocab words there, too, such as columpio, which means "swing." Tobogán is "slide." And the little rocks (roquitas) on the playground, which Daniela wanted to put in her mouth, are "caca." Clearly.

What else is going on...oh yeah, big news in Spain today: two of the leaders of ETA ("Euzkadi ta Azkatasuna," which is the terrorist group in the Basque country here in Spain), were captured and put in prison in France. The main guy's name is Txeroki, which is pronounced like "Cherokee." The Basque Country is a small part of Spain where they speak Basque and Spanish, but some of them want to secede. Basque, by the way, is a completely different language from Spanish. Unlike Catalan, Valencian or Galician, which are all separate languages spoken in regions of Spain, Basque doesn't derive from Latin. In fact, it doesn't have a known parent language. I don't know much about it, yet, but I've seen the terrorists doing their...terrorism (?) on the news. It's weird, too, because a lot of the things they show on the news here would never be played in the US. And when they show the terrorists being arrested, it's the cops who wear ski masks so they won't be recognized and hunted down by other ETA members. Loco.

Y ya está por ahora. Or...that's it for now.

keep on keepin' on

Hopefully today will mark the end of having to do official stuff foreigners have to do to live here. Well, that's not true, because I still need to set up a bank account. Lameeee. Today I had to go to Córdoba (before the sun came up) in order to do more junk to get my NIE card: numero de identificación por extranjeros which is more or less Spain's version of the green card. I left on the 6:30 a.m. bus here in Cabra to get to Córdoba for an appointment at the police department to turn in even more paperwork and get fingerprinted. Joy of joys. I got the actual number of my NIE card, but I won't get the actual card for another month and then I'll have to go back to Córdoba AGAIN to pick it up. Rahhhhh, curses.

Other stuff ~ this evening I did my first tutoring class, ever. I worked with Marta and Paco, who are brother and sister. Marta is 7 and Paco is 4, and their mother is Carmen, a teacher at my school. They were adorable, but I'm going to have to figure out methods that work to teach young children, because it's clearly different from middle/high school-aged kids. The attention-span issue is frustrating for me, but it's hard to get angry at a 4 year-old, especially when s/he's so cute. I started as a language TA for 101 classes in college, now I just keep going down in age...eek.
This weekend I'm doing another private tutoring class for a college student who comes home during the weekends. She originally was going to be taught by Emily, but Emily is already doing so many classes that she is offering to give a bunch of her people to the rest of us girls since she feels swamped. Must be nice, though, since she's making an extra 300 euro a month for her efforts. If we were in a bigger city, we'd be able to make almost twice that, but the cost of living would eat up all the extra cash, so it's the same in the end.

Over the weekend I put up a ton of flyers advertising tutoring, but I was frustrated to see that a lot of them were removed. I guess they were either in places were posters frequently get removed, but I'm still annoyed. I'm going to copy more flyers tomorrow at school and put up more around town on lamp posts and big bulletin boards I see in town. I'm confused why my flyers were pulled off the bulletin boards, too. How irritating. I have a feeling that word of mouth advertising is much more effective than the flyers, but I'm going to do both and see where it gets me.

Other than official stuff -- life's not bad. Emily was here for the weekend and I showed her around my little pueblo and had some fun. This weekend will probably be low key and I'll just be hanging out in Cabra, but the weekend after this one I'll be in Edinburgh, Scotland with Carole, who lives in Málaga, and two other girls from Málaga who I've never met. I'm super psyched, yay!

Anyway, I'm wiped from getting up at 5-something this morning, so I'm going to faceplant in my pillows. Buenas noches.

Fin de semana que viene aquí en Cabra

More fun stuff -- Emily is on her way from Canillas de Aceituno! That is the name of her town, by the way, and it only has 2500 people. When she told me how small it was, I asked her if it was some kind of tribal village where they live in teepees or something. I forgot that some of the people in my program are in SUCH small towns. Like I said in here once before, my high school had more people than that. Loco. But it should be a lot of fun, I'm totally excited.

Yesterday after school, I went to Baena with Rosana, one of the English teachers. She is great. We went out to get lunch, first. I should add that we got lunch at 4 p.m. which is completely normal here -- remember that Spaniards eat at weird times: breakfast is usually at 11 a.m. and it consists of a something light like toast with olive oil and an espresso or café con leche, then lunch is between 2 to 4 p.m. and that is the biggest meal, there is a snack somewhere in between, and then there is a light dinner which can be anytime between 8 p.m. (at the earliest) and midnight.
Anyway, woops on that tangent -- after we ate, Rosana and I shopped around town, walked through the park and saw the sights of Baena, we went to Carrefour, which is the equivalent of Target here in Spain, and I met her grandmother and her mom, briefly. It was fun, and I should also add that I spoke Spanish almost continuously with few lapses into English. I speak Spanish here every day, but never for hours at a time, so I definitely got a mental workout. It's normal for me to think "crap, what is the third person past tense of 'to bring'" and "what preposition should I use in this sentence" ? Also, if I don't know how to say a phrase, sometimes I'll just use the direct English to Spanish translation, and usually that doesn't work so well for me. Woops.

Other things coming up this weekend include hanging out with Carlos and Noelia, who are my bilingual coordinator and his girlfriend/one of the professors I work with, too, respectively. We'll be going out to the country to "tomar algo" (eat/get some drinks) and just hang out. Also, Raul, the Chief of Studies will be coming, too (not sure what his exact job description is, but that's his title at my school). I haven't asked Carlos if Emily can come with us yet, because he just told me about this plan to go out and get drinks in the country after I had invited Emily to visit me in Cabra, but I'm pretty sure it will be fine. We'll see!

One other thing I haven't mentioned in here, yet -- I have a private tutoring class planned for next Tuesday! Yay! I'm going to teach two children of one of the teachers at my school. They are 4 and 7 years old, so I am going to have to rack my brain for what to teach little kids who have virtually no knowledge of English. This will be completely new territory for me, but I'm still excited. Their names are Marta and Paco, by the way -- Marta is 7 and Paco is 4. I'm sure they'll be adorable. Carmen, their mother, told me that they're super excited to meet me. Yay.

Yay for fun things in Spain. Hasta luego.

O-BA-MA!!!!!

Tangent from my usual musings about my life here in Spain....

OBAMA WON!!! I'm really happy, too. Also, I still can't believe that the USA decided to put that racial pish posh BS aside, for this. It's not like it's the end of racism in the United States, but it's definitely a huge leap towards more acceptance. I just hope that Obama can steer the USA back to the great country it is supposed to be, on the international playing field, and less of an economic flop of doom and a war monger that we can include among George W. Bush's accomplishments in the past 8 years. I can't believe that I'll always have to say that Bush was the president for the majority of my high school and ALL of my college years -- he is just such an embarrassment.

Last night, the girls in my apartment had a mini fiesta for the election. We played some games and had some bebidas (drinks), but the election results were finalized after we were long asleep -- at about 5 or 6 a.m.

It's funny to me, too, that all the profesores are asking me a) who I voted for and b) all my opinions and then they will also throw something in about un político negro (black politician) and how they can't believe he was elected -- but they are happy, because they overwhelmingly support Obama in Spain. When most Spaniards brought up the American presidential election, they would ask in the same breath if I would vote for Obama. Amusing...

Anyway....phew. I'm sure I'll bring up politics in this blog again at some point, but back to the rest of the junk I usually talk about in this blog.

I'm going on a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, in a few weeks! :-D I'm really excited, too, because I've been to England, but never to anywhere else in the UK. I'd like to make it to Ireland at some point, since I'm part Irish, but who knows when that will happen. But yeah, I'm going with Carole and 2 of the people she knows in Málaga. Originally we wanted to go to Rome, but the flights were ridiculously cheap to Edinburgh, so we booked that instead. I'd love to go to Rome, but I've already been there. Scotland should be a lot of fun.

As for THIS weekend, I changed my plans -- I'm not going to Málaga anymore, but Emily F. is coming to Cabra. A couple of Michelle's friends from Seville, who I have seen twice already, will be coming to Cabra, too. Emily B. and Kim will also be here. I figured, if all these people will be here, maybe it would be better to ask if Emily F. just to come here. I love to travel, but I'm getting a little bit of travel fatigue, because I'm definitely a homebody and I think traveling takes a bit more energy, planning and €s!!! I want to save a bit of €s because it seems like I've been blowing through a lot of money lately, and it would be nice to have some finances left over by the time I leave Spain! Ay ay ay. So yeah, it should be just as fun to be here in Cabra, even though it's a dinky town and there's not as much to do here as there is in Málaga. I'm definitely excited to see Emily again, too, since I haven't seen her since orientation. The fun thing about being abroad in groups like this is that social life for everyone is like potpourri -- so many different types of people that you would never interact with if you were in your comfort zone/social bubble that most people rarely leave when living in their hometown.

Speaking of random social events -- this weekend, I'll probably be going out just to hang out with my bilingual coordinator and his girlfriend, who also works at the school here, so I see her every day I'm working. They're both really relaxed and fun. They have 2 dogs and when I mentioned I wanted to see them again and offered to walk them if they ever need someone, she said that maybe we could all go out this weekend. Carlos and Noelia (those are their names) already have my number, so they can contact me whenever. Should be fun. It's definitely a completely different experience to hang out with people from another culture, but in a way, I'm used to being a fish out of water after moving so many times. But this is a whole different thing, too. Exciting.

OK, gonna get some work done...unfortunately, my bilingual coordinator, Carlos, isn't here today. I would be in an hour long meeting right now and actually being productive, but today I can't. Usually Carlos heads a weekly meeting that I sit in on and receive assignments from the teachers I work with: Mónica, the music teacher; Beatriz, the art teacher; and Victor, the French teacher.
So yeah, right now I'm kind of aburrida (bored). I don't have much work to do, either... I really wish that they used the language assistants for 24 instead of 12 hours and we made twice as much money -- that would be so much better. But I guess the average teacher 30-something hours in a school a week, but they're not constantly in class, so...I don't know how many hours teachers work on average. I just wish I could work MORE and get paid MORE. That would be sweet. Oh well. I just know that if I were in the USA working at a newspaper, right now, I'd probably be working 2-3 times as many hours in order to make the same money, which is ridiculous.

On that note, I return to being bored. Hasta luego.

Yay España

Exciting news: one of the English teachers, Rosana, offered to take me to her town Baena to walk around and have lunch together. She is going to drive me to Baena on Thursday after work and we will probably meet up with her fianceé, if he has free time, or I will just have coffee with her and look around Baena. I'm really excited to get to spend time with profesores fuera de la escuela (teachers outside of school).

Another fun oportunidad -- next Monday, which is a free day for me, I will be going back to Córdoba, this time also with teachers and maybe a friend or two, if any of them are free. I'm going to see an art exhibit that raises awareness for a day in Spain that focuses on domestic violence. I think it should be pretty interesting, I'm always drawn to topics like that (I am the biggest Law & Order nerd on the planet).

I was in Álora this weekend to visit Cassie and it was great. Cassie, like I said, is a girl I met during orientation. She is probably the person most similar to me that I have met here in Spain, so far, because we are both share similar interests and we have similar personalities. It's rare that I meet someone as cynical as I am, but when I do, my cold black heart sings with joy. OK, maybe not so much, but whatever.
Anyway, I met up with Cassie on Friday afternoon, once I got to Málaga. She lives in a little town about 30 minutes away from Málaga, so we met up there, just as a meeting place and so we could shop in the city, since Álora is so small and doesn't have any places. I did some damage with my finances, especially since I just got paid, but also because I legitimately needed some stuff. I got rain boots, since it is raining all the time here, lately, and I bought new slippers, because the 2€ slippers I had bought here in Cabra were falling apart and literally busting at the seams. No good. I also bought a coat, because I didn't have a winter coat here with me. Good stuff. I also found a new wallet, because that, too, was falling apart on me. So yeah....did some damage. But at least they were all pretty practical things and not stuff I just wanted to buy.
We were having fun shopping around, and we managed to miss our train, though, so that was kind of a bummer, since we had to wait 2 hours for the next train to Álora. It wasn't too bad waiting, we just ended up eating Halloween candy that we got at a nearby store. The problem arrived once we got to Álora and there were no taxis and the number to get taxis there was busy, constantly. We finally got a taxi when Cassie called the local hotel and the hotel desk guy gave Cassie the HOME number of a taxi driver, who told her he'd come get us, but it would take him 20 minutes to pick us up. We said we would wait forever, because there was no way we were going to walk up the MOUNTAIN up to where she lives. Álora is seriously on top of a mountain, it is the hilliest city I have ever seen in my life. Well, it wasn't too bad. We got there in one piece.

That night, we met up with Nick, another language assistant who is in our program. Funny story -- Nick also went to school in Ithaca, except he was at Cornell and I was at Ithaca College. It's strange that we were both in such a small town in the USA and now we are meeting in a small town in Spain -- what are the odds? So yeah, we met up with him and we met his Spaniard friend, Paco. Paco turns out to speak fluent English, because he studied it at Málaga University. He was a nice guy. We went out with Nick and Paco to a couple bars and then went to the dance club, or discoteca, as they are called here in Spain. We ended up going home at 5 a.m., in typical Spanish style. Ridiculous to American standards, I know, but it's normal here to stay up even past sunrise and then sleep most of the day and do the whole thing again the next day. Big cultural difference, what can I say.

This weekend I'm planning to meet up with another girl in my program, Emily, who also lives in a small town, but in the Málaga province, and I'm in the Córdoba province. We are going to meet up in Málaga and spend the weekend there for her birthday. Should be a good time.

Ay, I've already written so much stuff, but I feel like there's so much more I could say. It's so different living in a foreign country in that my schedule is completely different and life doesn't feel as lather-rinse-repeat as it can be in the USA. Sometimes it can be a bit exhausting, trying to jam pack so many activities a short period of time and interact with so many people, especially for me -- I can be a bit of a home body and an introvert, so I feel like I expend a lot of mental energy trying to get everything done that I want to do. At the same time, I don't want to say that I wasted my time in Spain and didn't see as much of Spain that I could and do everything I want to do.
Apart from all the excitement of life here, sometimes it can be a drag with things like the weather or other small things like lack of consistent hot water and perpetually cold apartments. Every once in a while I get frustrated with the language barrier and I think of how much easier it would be if I could speak to my landlord in English about things like the washer being broken, or tell the guy off who delivers the mail that he is a jackass for ringing my doorbell a million times and then having the nerve to be rude to me when I was in the shower and not just igorning him ringing my doorbell 9 million times. Seriously, the machismo that is present in Spain can drive me crazy. There is definitely sexism here in Spain, and I don't really consider myself a hardcore feminist, but some of the things that happen here just rub me the wrong way. The sports section of the newspaper, for instance, has TONS of stuff about men's soccer, but the section with women's soccer was barely bigger than two postage stamps together. Ridiculous.

Anyway, not to leave on a Debbie Downer note, but I should probably get back to work. I leave school in about half an hour and then it's back to the grind in the morning. Adiós!