We played hockey last Thursday, I was goalie. Nobody scored on me mwuahahaha, poor lil spanish kids.
Don't leave champagne in the freezer for more than an hour...Although it does become nice, alcohol flavored shaved ice: glass particles included at no extra cost!
hello phone????
Someone etched this on a window.
I ate that in Valladolid (see:previous post). Lubina = Sea Bass! The music teacher and his wife laughed at me because they gave me a whole fish and I just said "uhhh, how do I eat this?!"
The Chinese Store is always good for a laugh. She irresistible! This is a huge table cloth pattern.
There is an elevated parking lot over the bus station in Cuellar. This is an adjacent building.
My roommate Daniel and I adopted a 10 month old cat. She is not photogenic. Her name is Xoya (Zoya in English) and she's extremely friendly.
Every Spanish woman dyes her hair maroon red (not really, but a lot of them).
After class I went with the music teacher Jose Luis to the city about 45mins north of Cuellar called Valladolid. It has a little over 300,000 residents and is incredibly spread out. We had lunch at his house then he had to take his daughter to get a vaccination/set up instruments at the bar that his cover band ACROSS was going to play at, so he pawned me off to the movie theater where I saw Los Descendientes (The Descendants) with George Clooney, directed by the guy who also made Sideways, Alexander Payne. The spanish dub of the film wasn't that bad, plus its a good movie, it was dramatic (while being minorly melodramatic in a few moments) and very funny. George Clooney gave a very George Clooney performance.
This is my music teacher's band ACROSS. He's in the background (back right) playing on the keyboard. They had a list of songs on the wall and all you had to do was call out the name of the song and they'd be ready to play it on the spot. Their singer was excellent also! A few on the list were: Starman (David Bowie), Suzy Q, I Put A Spell On You, Time (Pink Floyd), a lot of Creedence Clearwater Revival (they started with Bad Moon a Risin'), etc. Definitely an American Audience-centric band.
Here's a little sample:
Monday, January 23, 2012
In the giant Eroski grocery center 15 minutes by bus from my flat there are large painted snails all similar to Cincy's painted pigs that are found downtown. I thought this was the coolest of them.
Every other Wednesday in the library we have some kind of poetry related event. One time students rapped bulgarian a capella communist revolutionary rap (teachers were a little 'meh :\' to the idea), another time they showed pictures of a teacher who walked El Camino de Santiago, a 780km walk!
This is an image that I see everyday on my way home from Cuellar. I always think to myself "Oh look it's Gondor". Gondor (edit* Minas Tirith!) is of course one of the cities of men from Lord of the Rings, see:
Hello! I'm back in Spain and it's really cold! It's making Ohio's rainy weather look pretty pleasant right about now. There is heavy fog most mornings, my house is so cold that you can't walk around in bare feet, and my job remains extremely easy, mwuahaha. Just kidding, but not really.
I miss American whole milk...OH and my family whoops forgot to mention that!
One of the girls in my class had the Three Kings on her nails hahah. When the Three Kings come Jan. 6th is when Spanish people open their Christmas gifts.
One of the bus drivers that takes me to Cuellar has an EPIC mullet and I am going to get very Investigative Journalist on his ass until I get a clear picture. He's got mullet like black women got booty. Truth.
Today in my very trying gym class the kids all lined up and had to make a huge bridge and then my teacher and I rolled weight balls underneath them. This is my favorite set of students. They're very talkative and funny.
Hello! It's been more than a month - how crazy. Many things have happened in the past month and most of them have been pretty boring, which is why I haven't updated this in a while.
FOR EXAMPLE: On Thursday I had to attend one 50 min class period. It was a gym class and since the gym was occupied by another class, we had to have ours outside. I threw frisbee with three students and the gym teacher Eloy for about 20 minutes, then Eloy had the great idea that we should try to throw frisbees into the basket hoop, which we then attempted to do for about 30 minutes. That is what I did at school on Thursday. On Wednesday I played Ping Pong, watched a French Opera in my bilingual English classroom full of Spanish kids (huh?), and helped some kids read a worksheet in History class. It's not rocket science here, people.
Segovia is full of Christmas lights right now hanging above all of the streets. They all are different patterns and shapes and in the main Plaza there is a giant LED tree that looks awesome.
Last night I went to a bar (heard Grease again...wtf!) with some friends and we saw Papa Noel! They don't open presents until Jan. 6th in Spain because that is the day the three Magi came to visit Jesus. That's like two weeks after us, how ridiculous!
One day I was walking by Hogwarts (you remember Hogwarts right?) when a helicopter landed randomly on the giant concrete area next to the school then flew away almost as quickly.
Here are two soundbites I've taken during the 15 minute choir practice that the music teacher (Jose Luis) hosts in his classroom during Chaos Period. They've chosen a good song!
Tonight I'm going to a Christmas party at the Italian assistant's house. My roommate and I are bringing mulled wine and I'm wearing reindeer antlers (bought at the Chinese Store) + this shirt that my mom bought me last year:
I'll update this next week before Christmas, promise!
It's been 2 weeks, wow. I apologize for not updating for such a long time but nothing of interest has happened recently and I'd rather put nothing on this blog than something that isn't interesting or funny. For Halloween my mom sent me this stuff ------->
I don't really like candy corn that much (an entire bags worth? no) so I brought the remainder of my supply to school and shared it with the teachers. They were all freaking out! They had never had this before and thought it was so tasty. Even the other English assistant was like "Whaaaa!? Candy Corn!". She said it reminded her of home a lot (me too). Never again will I underestimate the nostalgic power of Candy Corn.
For a size comparison of that peanut butter container (2lbs 8oz) here's another picture:
I was going for something similar to the bowler hat painting hahah.
There isn't much rhyme or reason to this post other than a few interesting things that have happened to me recently. I went to a cave party...which is literally a party we had in a cave that we found under my friend's apartment complex. My friend Claire lives near the Alcazar (the castle) and in the garage of her complex is a door that leads into this medieval cave/tunnel. It used to be connected to the castle. I can guarantee that there will be plenty of parties in the cave this year :).
This is an audio track I took of my loud class in a room that sounds echo-y enough to be a cave. Turn to this up to full volume and you'll understand how it feels to be in their presence. They were asking each other History questions in English. There's obviously also a large amount of Spanish going on too (duh). This is a typical class for me.
Next are some videos I have taken in the past week. Two weeks ago my class acted out a short story called Lamb to the Slaughter. This week another teacher liked the idea so we did it again with a different class. I decided that videos had to be taken because there are so pretty funny moments to note. The first video starts as the girl on the right (playing a guy named Patrick) just told his pregnant wife (played by the girl on the left in blue) that he was leaving her. It (leaving someone) was kind of a weird phrase to explain to the kids. I was like "It's kind of a like a divorce, but not really but kind of. When two people don't love each other any more one of them might just leave/go away." A short synopsis of the story: A man is about to leave his wife for another woman, woman kills man with a frozen piece of lamb, which she then sticks in the oven (the drawer in the teacher's desk haha) and then she goes to the store and buys some groceries, then she comes home and calls the police and when they come they don't discover anything and she invites them to dinner, where they eat the weapon (the lamb) that she used to kill the husband. This first video starts after the wife kills her husband.
My favorite part of this first video is towards the very end, when one of the kids says "there is some frozen dew here (or some word I can't quite make out)" (or something very similar to that) referring to Patrick's body. Now, the entire time they're acting this play out the kids are just kind of winging it and not saying the lines exactly (obviously, if you listen to what the kids actually say), BUT this one kid really wanted to take the play to a whole new level and kept asking me if we could do all of these really complicated, ridiculous things. He wanted everyone to say their lines accurately and wanted the lamb (which was just a dictionary) to be hidden out the window because its cold outside and that would act as a 'freezer' of sorts. I was just like, No, no no no no to everything he said mostly. SO THEN at the very end he adds that frozen dew line which is extra hilarious because A) its not even in the play and B) half of these kids can't form a complete sentence most of the time, yet one of them adds his own line and its about frozen dew, how does he even know what that is! It made me laugh.
This is the second video and has its own share of highlights.
-In the first scene the kid forgets his line for about 20 seconds until the teacher bails him out
-the pregnant wife has no baby bump and doesn't pay the grocer for the food she gets (which the teacher and I laughed about)
-"My husband dead!"
Police-"We have to find the weapon."
Wife-"Would you like to have some supper?"
Police-"....yes."
Halloween is not important in Spain. Monday was the saddest Halloween I've ever been apart of. I did not dress up because I had just gotten back from a weekend in Burgos (which consisted of drinking nice, cheap beers and nursing hangovers) and none of my friends were dressing up. Halloween is a Celtic Holiday so you'd think the Irish would have kind of spread the tradition throughout Europe by now...but nope. Everyone laughs at it in Spain (and France too, I hear) and the people who do dress up all look the same: zombie makeup, which is just a really white face with maybe some blood and black raccoon eyes. Lame!
Adding to the sadness of my Monday also was the fact that I was at a bar and during the DJ's "dance music set" (heavy air quotes), they played Grease.......I'm talking Grease Lightning. And it was in no way sarcastic, lemme tell you. Now just let that realization sink in....
I have taken a few interesting pictures since the last time I posted.
Here is the cathedral in Burgos. Once you've seen one cathedral, you've kind of seen them all! It's a massive, amazing, churchly structure.
This is a sign in my school's gymnasium. My favorite is the title, slightly cut off in the top left: English ZONE. Maybe I should enter class every day while cracking my knuckles and telling the kids its time to GET INTO THE ENGLISH ZONE.
Today I had two gym classes and I basically played Ping Pong the entire day with the kids. I think this is going to happen a lot because I mentioned to the gym teacher Eloy that Ping Pong is my favorite sport. He had me teach kids how to hold a paddle and hit the ball, hahah really tough day for me. If its possible to click on the picture to enlarge it, one will notice that these tables are just colored pieces of that ply wood that you might for example find at a new construction site or decide to burn in a bonfire. The paddles we use are plastic and have felt cloth where you hit the ball. My Ping Pong Elitism left me without words the first time I saw this setup but Eloy says that the kids will ruin a net after a day (yeah I haven't even mentioned the 'net', it's also as you can see a piece of wood) and that the paddles pretty much have to be the strongest material possible because they'll be broken easily as well.
I tried to make a sound recording of the kids in Angel's class today because they were insane as always but my ipod wasn't working :(. Another time.
AND FINALLY: Nothing like walking through Cuellar seeing a guy carrying a couple of dead baby pigs on his shoulder.
We played hockey last Thursday, I was goalie. Nobody scored on me mwuahahaha, poor lil spanish kids.
Don't leave champagne in the freezer for more than an hour...Although it does become nice, alcohol flavored shaved ice: glass particles included at no extra cost!
hello phone????
Someone etched this on a window.
I ate that in Valladolid (see:previous post). Lubina = Sea Bass! The music teacher and his wife laughed at me because they gave me a whole fish and I just said "uhhh, how do I eat this?!"
The Chinese Store is always good for a laugh. She irresistible! This is a huge table cloth pattern.
There is an elevated parking lot over the bus station in Cuellar. This is an adjacent building.
My roommate Daniel and I adopted a 10 month old cat. She is not photogenic. Her name is Xoya (Zoya in English) and she's extremely friendly.
Every Spanish woman dyes her hair maroon red (not really, but a lot of them).
