enthpenthka

She&Him is my favorite (still-touring) band--ABBA being my all time favorite. Last summer on the drives to and from my nannying job I would listen to their first cd in the car and sing along. The lyrics are really dumb, however, as they're mostly chorus they're exceptionally great to sing along to. So I did. With gusto.

They just released an album and I was so sad that I wouldn't be able to go to their concerts because their very ~indie-hipster~ and I've never lived anywhere that I thought qualified as sufficiently ~indie-hipster~ enough. I even tweeted about it. Something to the effect that they should have a concert in the Midwest when I came home or one while I was in Spain. Either/or.

A little over a month ago my friend Crystal posted on facebook that She&Him had two concerts in the Midwest scheduled. TWO. But both of them were when I was here in Spain. Cursing my luck I went onto their website to see if they were going to come back to the Midwest later in the summer. And they weren't.

But they were going to play in Spain. IN MADRID.

( I bought my ticket the very next day. Click here to read more )

Why don't I update my blog very often?

I was actually thinking about this on the bus ride to work the other day and I realized that that's where the problem lay. I'm not here vacationing, traveling or even studying. I'm working. And even though I love my job, there is something about the rhythm of working that covers everything about Madrid with a veneer of normalcy.

And what's normal is, by it's very essence, kind of boring sometimes.

So in an effort to take a fresh look at my day-to-day life, here is a little (ha!) run through of a normal day:

The Morning:

My alarm goes off at 7:01 am. I wake up at either 7:37 or 7:41. What am I doing for forty-odd minutes? Hitting the snooze button. I'll have you know though, I'm really good at adding by fours when I'm half asleep to figure out when my alarm will go off again. It's probably my best math moment of my entire day.

Once I'm awake, out of bed and the alarm has been turned off, I get ready for the morning. Get dressed, brush my teeth, put my school bag together. I always have to check two or three times to make sure I put my keys in my bag. Once I locked myself out of my apartment, and I've been paranoid ever since (Once I locked myself out of my bedroom. After several panicked minutes, I forced the door open).

There are three buses I can take. The first bus is the Melanie and Steve bus. The second bus is the middle bus and the last bus is the late bus. I like to get the Melanie and Steve bus or the middle bus.

Melanie and Steve are BFFs with the bus driver on their bus and there is a woman who always gets on the bus with a loaf of bread.

There is a father-son duo that ride the middle bus and always sit with one on each side of the aisle.

And on the late bus there is this old guy in a green cardigan with bug eyes who reeks of cigarette smoke who always seems to sit next to me.

I always have first grade classes in the morning and these kids are hysterical. There are moments when I just lift my book in front of my face so I can laugh. Sometimes Marga and I exchange glances and we just crack up.

A few highlights:

The kids were watching part of the Planet Earth documentary and two male animals were fighting. One kid asked why they were fighting and before either Marga and I could say anything Hugo shouts: "Para las chicas, claro." ("For girls, duh")

"Are tomatoes smooth or rough?" A normally quiet little girl in the back of the class confidently raised her hand and said, "Giraffe."

"What do we use animals for?" Instead of the expected (and correct) answers of food, work or pets, one boy shouted out: "Decoration!"

And of course, when we talked about good and bad smells, one kids said that the toilet smells bad and every boy shouted: "NO! IT SMELLS GOOD!" Oh little boys, never change.

Recreo aka Breakfast

After the first two classes we have a thirty minute breakfast. The kids run outside with apples, oranges, yogurts or cookies for recess and the teachers congregate in the caffeteria for breakfast. There always are platters of meat, slices of french bread, fruit, coffee, juice and the Spanish variety of snack cakes.

Recently they've been bringing out plates of chicken wings. And they are amaaaazing. Last week Steve and I sat there and filled our plates with bones and then we tried some of these chocolate covered coconut balls and macaroons. It was A+.

There is one class after recreo before lunch which usually goes by very quickly.

Lunch

For the first hour (first of two hours), while the teachers have meetings, we auxiliares chill in the English room.

Let's have a run through of my fellow auxiliares:

Melanie: She's confidant, self-assured, speaks her mind, knows everyone and everything about the school and is quite proud of the fact that I've admitted to being afraid of her. She and I get along really well and she has two nicknames for me: "That/This One" and "Wisconsin." She has made me laugh so hard that I've had an asthma attack. Not once, not twice but probably weekly.

Steve: Steve is not as young as the rest of us, married and rooms with Melanie. They also have a third roommate named Andrew who is a sad example of a human being. Steve believes that my childhood in Wisconsin was a Norman Rockwell painting and he wants to be friends with my dad--Dad, Steve wants to go ice fishing with you.

Fiona: She's from Scotland and is nice. She spends a lot of time in the computer lab, so the rest of us don't get to talk to her very often.

After our first hour of chillaxing we have lunch. Recently it's been a lot of fish (Catholic country during Lent, go figure) and I'm really not a fan of fish. At all. So lunch has been rough. A few weeks ago we had steak, that was exciting.

Sometimes on Fridays the teachers go out to lunch. Two weeks ago we went to a Chinese buffet (or boo-fet as they say in Spain) and while the food was so-so I had a great time with Melanie and two of the teachers Laura and Carolina.

The Afternoon

There are just two forty five minute classes after lunch and these are mostly my second grade classes. The difference in the language ability of the second graders and the first graders is just phenomenal. The cognitive differences is really amazing too. The second grade and first grade books parallel each other, but the discussions I can have with the second graders are above and beyond what the first graders can do.

The last unit we did had a lot of experiments and I got to lead most of those and the kids loved them. It was so much fun, although one experiment was a bit of a disaster.

Here's what was supposed to go down:

Three glasses filled with hot water. One glass was wrapped in a wool scarf, one in cotton and one in silk. At regular five minute intervals, the temperature of the water in each glass would be taken and the results recorded. Wool was supposed to stay warm the longest, silk the shortest.

That, uh, did not happen.

The "silk" scarf was black and the "wool" scarf was white. Already you can see two problems. The first being that I didn't actually have any wool or silk scarves and was using one euro El Rastro scarves that looked silkish and woolish and the other was the color of the scarves.

I ended up filling the "silk" cup with room temperature water and then, um...liberally interpreting the thermometer measurements.

One particularly bright kid asked why the temperature was rising in the "silk" cup and Marga said, "Don't ask questions."

I'm sure the inventors of the scientific method were rolling in their graves.

After School

Every day after school I teach a private class.

Two days a week I tutor one of the teacher's children for a big English oral exam at the end of the year. I have the list of questions he's going to be asked, and so we run through those. Some of the questions he doesn't understand or know how to answer, so I've been taking one or two of those each time and we work on learning the concepts he needs to know to answer the question.

To keep it from getting too boring, every 15 minutes or so we read a page from Fox in Socks together. He thinks the book is hysterical and cracks up with I stumble over the words.

One afternoon a week I tutor four teenage girls. Their mothers really want them to work on their speaking skills so we do a lot of dialogues, debates, and speaking games. Last week I said I'd give a packet of Kool Aide to whoever could speak the longest on their assigned topic. One girl had drawn "Twilight" and she spoke for Eight Solid Minutes. And when she stopped, it wasn't because she'd run out of things to say, it was because the other girls caught me yawning.

Finally my last class is for two ten year old boys. Of all of my students they have the most advanced English skills. I've been borrowing reading books from my school library. The first half of the book is nonfiction and the second half is a fiction story based on the nonfiction information. The boys really like it.

The Evening

I tend to get home around between 7-7:30 every night and make dinner between 8 and 8:30 which is on the early side for a Spanish dinner. I eat, have an hour or two of time to myself, then get ready for bed and sleep.

On Tuesdays (my free day) and weekends I run errands, buy groceries, cook, plan lessons, watch movies, go shopping, walk in Retiro, hang out with my roommates etc.

Friday night I went out for Indian food with a group of friends and then we went to a live jazz concert which was really fun. The music was great. I hate listening to jazz on the radio or a cd, but I really love it live. I don't get it either.

As the weather gets nicer (this, rainy, cold, weekend being an exception) I'll go on more day trips to surrounding cities and apparently there is a Taco Bell in Madrid which I'll have to try to find at some point.

Hopefully my recounting of the normal and mundane wasn't boring to read.

After lunch at school today all of the classes were taken outside. We formed a giant ring around the center of the courtyard.

The children fell (mostly) silent.

From inside the school, the mournful sound of a band comprised of five teachers could be heard. Solemnly they marched into the courtyard--dressed in black, black tears painted on their cheeks, playing a funeral march. Behind them a giant cardboard sardine covered in paper scales was carried out.

The sardine was well over ten feet long and three feet wide at its widest part. Both front and bank were covered in paper scales that the students had colored with either markers or paint. Some scales were drenched in glitter. All of which had been glued on with liberal amounts of glue stick glue.

While the band continued to play the sardine was propped up on two boxes and then set on fire.

Let me repeat that.

It. Was. Set. On. Fire.

While it burned the children sang a song (could not understand a single word, but it ended with them raising their hands above their heads and wiggling their fingers).

The cardboard sardine went up in flames very quickly--accompanied by a cloud of black-gray smoke. I don't even want to know how many carcinogens I inhaled from the burning paper, glue, marker, paint and glitter.

Once the sardine had burnt to a pile of ashes (less than two minutes), the band switched to "La cucaracha" and everyone went back inside.

I asked a few teachers why we lit a giant cardboard sardine on fire and the only thing they could tell me was: "Technically we're supposed to bury it."

Yeah, I don't know either.

Brennan from the TV show Bones wears crocs. Just like my mother.
(Promo picture from an upcoming episode but not a spoiler)

I am back in Spain. My trip from Sabine's house back here was totally uneventful--except for the part where I accidentally rolled my suitcase over my still healing toes (although that was less "eventful" and more "PAIN!").

On the train (there are THREE stations in Frankfurt, btw, not two. And the airport is the third station) I listened to music and did a great blank stare whenever anyone tried to talk to me in German. It took FOREVER to get through security at the airport. Everyone in front of me was trying to bring all sorts of banned things on the plane. Yogurt, juice boxes, bottles of coke, bottles of shampoo, milk, french fries. And they all must have been wearing metal underwear because they all beeped going through the metal detector and had to be patted down.

There is something to be said for American's paranoid airport security. I reached the check point with my arms full of items to be dumped into plastic boxes to go through the x-ray machine and I'd made a point not to wear any jewelry, belts or watches that morning. I breezed right through.

Has anyone seen the movie All About Steve? Because they stopped it on the plane with only five minutes left so I didn't to see the end. I'm not too torn up because it was a kind of stupid movie, but I really hate not knowing how a story ends.

Over Christmas break I didn't do much. Sabine had procrastinated like whoa and she had to work on a project all break. So while she worked on her project I watched movies on my laptop, wrote, read, drew pictures of plants, reads some more. Managed to outrun the first monster in SkiFree only to be eaten by the second and lost an embarrassing amount of solitare games.

One day we went into town and went shopping. I bought an external harddrive (500GB) to back up my writing and then I proceeded to organize my writing (I really hate myself for naming my documents things like story12 or miscstoryramblings). We also hit up a sale at H&M and for 5euro I got a Star Wars shirt.

The day before yesterday we went and toured the palace. I thought it was fascinating (did you know that most of the rooms on the second floor (first floor to my European readers) were totally destroyed? The ceilings collapsed and the walls were burnt when the allied forces bombed the city at the end of WWII? City leaders had removed all of the furniture, paintings, tapestries and wooden wall panels, but the palace was basically a burned out skeleton. They've been restoring it ever since and it looks AMAZING now. The most impressive is a room filled with mirrors decorated in gilded scroll work, paintings and glinting enameled frescoes. Only a few sections of the mirrors survived and the method for creating them had been lost to time and they gave up hope trying to restore it--until a craftsman said he thought he could do it. It looks really amazing now. Just like the before pictures.

While I was enjoying the tour, Sabine had completely spaced out--paying attention only long enough to hear the phrase "the ceilings and floors were devestated" to which she snickered.

We did watch a lot of movies and TV shows together. After years of saying she didn't need to watch The Sound of Music I made her watch it and Sabine spent the remainder of the two weeks obsessively singing the songs. We also watched the first six episodes of Glee and I sucked it up and watched some House for her and she sucked it up and watched some Bones for me.

Christmas day itself was very nice, and New Year's rather miserable. Did you know that they let just anyone set off fireworks on New Year's Eve? And most of the people with the fireworks are three sheets to the wind? That was a very unpleasant experience I'd never like to repeat. Ever. I huddled in an alcove of a building and watched as the entire city exploded around me. The first thirty seconds were pretty (we were up high and could see fireworks all over the city) but then the smoke got so thick that you couldn't see anything and it just went on and on and on. It was awful.

And the fondue Sabine's friend's made had so much white wine in it, it didn't taste like cheese and just tasted like alcohol. So I ate bread and vegetables and got really overwhelmed as my brain tried to make sense of everyone speaking German around me.

After the fireworks when I started crying THEN everyone wanted to speak English.

I think that being in Spain (and in Germany) is much harder and culture shock is much worse because I don't have the group of close friends that I had in Sweden. Right from the get-go in Sweden I had a really great and awesome friend (Laila) and I made a lot of new friends at church within the first month. While I do have friends here, and I do love spending time with all of them, I haven't made the same sort of close friends like I did before--and I think that makes a world of difference in a new country culture.

One advantage Spain does have is the language. Once I got onto the plane and everything was in Spanish or English and the flight attendants were all speaking Spanish it was such a huge relief. When my first set of headphones were broken I flagged down an attendant and explained that mine were broken and showed her how--all in Spanish without having to think about it. Granted, considering the fact that I've managed to survive for three months in Spain thus far, it's not exactly a great accomplishment, but it was so nice. After two weeks I can finally communicate effectively (more or less) in a foreign language. This language that is not English? I CAN SPEAK IT. HA.

As you can tell, not being able to understand any German was a wee bit more stressful than I'd anticipated.

Today I need to do some laundry, unpack. Try to figure out where to put the new books and dvds I got for Christmas and (arguably, most importantly) find a store that's open on Three Kings Day and buy some toothpaste because I'm practically out and that's just gross.

And I just remembered that I have no food. SAD DAY.

At least Sabine's mother sent me home with five million pounds of cookies and a massive jar of marmalade.

See videos of me opening presents and cracking nuts here!

Pictures here!

Christmas in Germany is going well :) It's weird though, because it doesn't feel like Christmas. I'm having a good time (despite my still swollen and painful toes and a cold that has turned me into a walking, coughing, snot factory), but it doesn't feel like Christmas.

Yesterday Sabine and I baked cookies (yesterday it was sugar cookies and today will be ginger bread--but we had to find a molasses substitute so we'll see how they turn out--I don't have the best of luck when it comes to cookies), and decorated the tree and had apple toast (take a piece of toast, butter it, add ham and apples (or mushrooms and tomatoes) cover with cheese and toast in the oven) and then I opened my presents from Emma and Anna (because we always open the kids presents on Christmas Eve); they gave me a cute gray cardigan and the book Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters--which will be epic. Finally Sabine and I watched the Christmas episode of the tv show Bones and the pilot of Glee.

This morning we woke up and had breakfast. Then Sabine and her mother called her sister on Skype. Her sister is studying in Korea and won't be home until January. Then the four of us (Sabine, Barbara and their mom) opened presents.

From Barbara I got a beautiful green silk pencil bag. Sabine's mom gave me a gift certificate to a bookstore, a tourist guide of Wurzburg, an angel ornament and a box of Chocolate. Sabine gave me her official study guide for the English certification test she took last year (I totally geeked out of it and have already decided that the reading comprehension is rubbish because the phrasing is so artificial), adorable pink bows and headbands and clips and a promise to make me a bag in whatever fabric I choose. From my parents I got white undershirts (Sabine's mother laughed so hard at that because that's what she had given Sabine), a black t-shirt a blue plaid robe and Bones S4 on dvd.

Now I'm uploading videos and pictures and we're going to make meatballs and dumplings for supper/lunch and later tonight I'm going to call my parents and watch either Star Wars or the Sound of Music (probably the Sound of Music...it's more "Christmas-y") with Sabine.

MERRY CHRISTMAS to everyone! I miss you all very much!!!