Girona this weekend.

For my birthday, Jose surprised me with a trip to Girona. He got a RyanAir special for 1 cent each, leaving from Madrid on Saturday at 12.50 and returning on Sunday at 6.35 am. So, we packed sandwiches and muffins, drove our car to the airport, and flew to Girona, about an hour from Barcelona. You can see the pictures!

Maybe it's coming from Toledo, but everything seemed so clean and inhabitant friendly. The city is full of new buildings and styles, fun bars and cafes and charming bridges that cross the river. The streets were crowded with a small amount of tourists and lots of Catalan. I felt like I had just arrived in a new country, when someone said something basic, and I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. It's overwhelming, but fun.


The biggest surprise happened on the way to the airport at 5 am. We were sitting on the shuttle bus and next to us were two people who worked for RyanAir. They were speaking together and I heard bits of their conversation: "semmit" and "nem tudom" and other pieces that identified them as Hungarian! Hungarians! Sitting next to me on the shuttle bus in Girona! So, I asked them, in my best Hungarian, if they were Magyar...and after a brief, confused look they said that they were. So, after switching into English (I forgot how well they spoke English), I told them all about living in Hungary, meeting Jose, and how I LOVED it. I think I looked a little crazy, because they weren't too excited to continue talking about how wonderful it was. Maybe I didn't explain myself well or maybe it was just 5 o'clock in the morning. But, even though they were a little less than friendly, it still made my morning to have met Hungarians in Spain and spent a little time thinking about my first foreign love.

We flew back to Madrid as the sun was coming up, drove back home and took a long nap. What a great weekend!

The Crisis!

Invest in Spain!

Jose sent me this picture this morning, and I couldn't resist posting it.
As the media covers the Spanish crisis I go between believing that it is mostly a media induced panic that causes even the youngest of my students to stutter "but...the crisis!" to almost anything anyone says, and between believing that it's only a matter of luck that we haven't been affected by it, yet. In fact, after last year's dramatic increase in gas and basic food costs, things have stayed the same or even gotten a little cheaper.

I don't doubt the existence of "the crisis", but I do wonder about just how much of our daily lives it affects. I'm sure, for those waiting for an apartment, it is a source of constant worry. And maybe I should be worried, working in the service industry. Yet, looking at the enrollment of the school where I work (we're really full) and the state of Spain's English, I can't get too worked up about it yet. Plus, there are good things for those who aren't constructors and aren't waiting for an apartment to be built. Cheaper cars and houses, for one, and higher interest rates, for another.

So, as everyone is settling into our new, terrible economy and getting used to waiting it out, I'm watching the news and comparing how much of what they report reflects in my wallet.

Old Men

On the left there is a slideshow of one of my favorite hobbies in Spain: taking pictures of old men. (There are a few old women, too.) I've moved it from my old blog to this one, at the suggestion of my FCE class.

My biggest challenge

At the school where I work we rotate teachers every couple of months (both for the kids' learning styles and access to accents and the teachers' sanity!). So this week I've rotated to Room 2, which is in general a very nice room. My biggest challenge this week (and I have a strange sensation that it will continue to be my biggest challenge until we rotate again on January 15th) comes on Mondays and Wednesdays at 5.40. It comes in the form of 10 very cute, very loud, very undeveloped 4 and 5 year olds! Ten of them. Together. In one class. For one hour.

Another day I will post my thoughts on what exactly parents can hope to get by putting their 4 year old in English class. But today I will limit myself to a little bit of pity and despair.

The hardest parts:
1. Learning names. There are ten children who look basically the same. They don't sit still in one place, so there's no chance of learning names in order. They answer to almost anything, because they haven't learned to resist against misinformation. The biggest loss of teacher momentum is found when you have to tell a child that they are doing something wrong and suddenly...you can't remember their name! Crap!
2. Energy. Wow. They move a lot! And are really loud! And are so so short! They're always sliding out of their chairs and shooting under their desks and sitting with their friend next to them or stealing another person's chair or coming up behind you and pulling your shirt or escaping to the bathroom or......the options are endless!
3. The coloring dilemma. While one child colors in minute detail, stopping every few seconds to think about the meaning of life or putting his head on the table, another dashes three scribbles in the form and announces "FINISHED! QUE HAGO??" (what do I do now?). Oh my goodness!
And every young child teacher knows that there is only so much coloring children will do. But how many options do you have when they can't even write their names and their attention spans don't allow for more than 4 new vocab words a week???
4. The sudden emotions. One moment a child is fine. The next, crying and pasting his face on the window to look for his "mama". One moment he or she is sitting normally in the chair, the next they are peeing down their legs. I know that it's probably normal, but it's enough to make you crazy!

Story: On Monday, we were all coloring (more or less) a picture of a train. I'm walking around the room (solving disputes over colors, motivating the slow colorers to get a move on, picking up things off the floor, herding lost children back to their seats), and notice little Miguel. Little Miguel has got little pieces of blue all over his face and even in his teeth. I'm wondering what in the world that could be, when I see his pencil. Hmmm.
Then we talked about coloring with the pencil and not eating it, and he reached for a green one. And now no one else wants to use this particular pencil, not that I blame them.

12 km - to Cuzcurrita

Our first "hike".
Jose and I were in Aranda this past weekend to visit his new cousin, among other things. We made plans to wake up on Sunday morning and drive to a nearby village, park the car and walk 12 kilometers (9 miles) to Cuzcurrita and back (12 km total). We chose this village because its an example of a trend that is affecting many villages in Spain.
It's abandoned.

As more and more people move towards cities, whole villages like this one are left behind.
The only thing left of the village, which nobody remembers as having many houses or a few, is the church. We couldn't even really tell where the houses once stood!


But the 12 kilometers was a nice walk. Actually, my legs were killing me after about 10, so the thought of walk twice that amount everyday for a month seems a little far fetched now. Let's see how we do over the next couple of months.


And these were some grapes we picked and ate along the way. Don't know how they avoided the harvest in October.

Camino de Santiago - Summer 2009??

What a better way to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, thought Jose and I, than walking the Camino de Santiago together?

If you are unfamiliar with the Camino (Way of Saint James, in English), it is a 750 kilometer (or more than 450 mile) pilgrimage through Spain to the city of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The most popular route begins in France, crosses the Pyrenees, and after about 27 days of walking through the plains of northern Spain, ends in Santiago. The origins of the pilgrimage are from the 9th century when a monk named Pelayo followed a star to the burial site of the apostle James the Greater. It was at its greatest during the 11 - 13th centuries, even rivalling pilgrimages to Rome and Jerusalem, but languished until its very recent revival.

It's been on our list of the things we'd love to do for a couple of years, but it's always hard to find a full month to take out of both of our lives to walk a really long way. And we both feel that if we don't do it now, it might have to be put off until after we retire! So, it's our goal for next August.
It's probably murder to do it in August, but that's the only possibility because of my work schedule.

So, the biggest step. How do you train for a 750 km walk? Follow our progress!By the way, this isn't a picture of the Camino. It was taken on one of our other trips.

My Last Request

This past Saturday was All Saints Day, and since Jose and I couldn't go to the supermarket (although we really needed to) and since we like the cemetery anyway, we took a walk up to where all the action was.

As we were walking around, me taking pictures a little self-consciously, a very important thing occurred to me, which I shared with Jose. When I die, if it's before you, and where ever I'm buried, please do not, ever, put plastic flowers on my grave. And, if for some reason, you absolutely must put plastic flowers on my grave, please do not put fluorescent plastic flowers on my grave.

I don't know if you can properly appreciate just how fluorescent these flowers were, but you could see them half a mile away! Incredible.



And here's a moment, just before we left. You can see the people, the graves and the flowers. And Jose, who was in a hurry to leave. But what made me take the video was the music coming from the chapel, which we listened to all morning long!