27th February: Nothing to Report

It’s getting to the stage where I’m having to remind myself I actually have a blog. I’ve settled into life here so easily that it would be easy to forget that I’m even on my year abroad. Of course, there are a lot of differences between the way I live now and the routine I have at home, but the changes are easy to become accustomed to here, and I find that the negative is more than balanced out by the positive. It also helps that here, unlike when I was in Russia, I have the independence of living in a student flat and only having a few lectures a week – such a relief after living with a tetchy old Russian lady and having lectures 9 till 1 every day. Not only that, but I’m not tediously counting down the days because every day is different here. And most of all, it’s not minus 26 degrees outside – which severely affects your motivation to get out of bed in the morning.

So, despite my illness at the weekend, which I recovered from after a restful twenty-four hours, I’m still in good spirits. On Sunday, I felt well enough to meet everyone at the markets by the river and have a wander around, and to participate fully in the huge feast we had in front of a Summer Heights High marathon. This was after I’d managed to drag a dazed Giorgos out of bed, since he’s a huge Summer Heights High fan and would never have forgiven us if we’d had the marathon without him. In the end we managed the whole series in an afternoon – as well as several baguettes and huge quantities of crisps, olives, lupin beans and sweets. A day well spent.

I started the week with my routine Monday morning jog, which was more of a challenge than usual since not only was I still feeling the effects of my illness, but the weather had taken a real downturn. By the afternoon, it was still chilly and was threatening rain – the absence of which we had been beginning to take for granted. Thankfully, my trip to campus for my Linguistics lecture was, for once, not wasted (although the professor did turn up twenty minutes late, naturally).

That evening, from 4.45 to 7.45, I was teaching Roberto, Sergio and Guillermo English again, and had prepared some resources for us to go through. These turned out to be really successful, especially with Guillermo, who spent the majority of the lesson in fits of laughter. He’s still struggling with the word ‘skipping’ and his favourite thing seems to be saying it over and over as fast as he can, as we’d done when I’d first taught it him. In fact, he seems to find it hilarious whenever we say anything fast – a tendency which, although slightly bizarre, is quite useful in a lot of situations.

After teaching, I headed back to the flat for some dinner before walking to Smöoy with Giorgos to meet Mira, who didn’t know how to get to Tandem. Due to an initial lack of actual Spanish people, Mira and I ended up spending most of the night talking Spanish just to each other, which was nice but a little odd, before she left and I got talking to some people from Murcia.

The next day, I turned up to my German lecture only to find that it wasn’t on again. It turned out my lecturer had the flu and hoped she’d be able to replace the lesson on Friday at 11. I can’t remember the last time we actually had a German lecture at the scheduled time. On the plus side, this gave me the whole day to get some work done before going out to my new teaching client at 5.30.

These next pupils are called Carmen Maria (like every other girl in Spain) and Gregorio, and are six and eight years old. For the first lesson, I kept them together so I could assess their levels of English and get to know them a bit better before splitting them up, when they would be more nervous. If I was tired before I started the lesson, I was exhausted by the time I came out. Because they’re so young, I had to work hard to keep their concentration and keep them interested for a whole hour, which involved thinking on my feet and coming up with all kinds of weird and wonderful games. At the end of the lesson, the mother, who is also called Carmen Maria, gave me some CDs they have to listen to from school so I could do some preparation. She seems really keen for them to gain a good knowledge of English so I’m going to have to make sure my lessons are focussed as well as fun.

After the lesson I had just under an hour to myself at the flat before going to meet my friends at the cathedral. Then we went back to fetch Giorgos and on to the Dominos Pizza at the end of the road for what was set to be a feast – a six Euros all-you-can-eat. Well, the maximum you can order is twelve pizzas, but I’m pretty sure it would take some kind of monster to eat that much. Between us we polished off five family-sized ones, after which we could barely move. It was a good night.

Today’s been another normal day; I started with a run (which was made unpleasant by the weather yet again), met my friends after lunch and had lectures 4 till 8. The only exciting thing that’s happened today is that we managed to get our bus tickets for Semana Santa, one of our weeks off. Semana Santa, or Holy Week, is a really important time here, Spain being a Catholic country, so we’ve decided to visit Cordoba and Seville to see the parades and celebrations.

Apart from that, it’s been a dull day, definitely not helped by the cold and the persistent showers, which are causing us a disproportionate amount of upset given the fact we’re from the UK. Giorgos has invited me to a party he’s going to, but I think I might just snuggle up in bed with a film. Wet and cold weather is just not something I am willing to deal with any more.