Good old Spain

Another update from sunny-rainy-sunny-rainy Spain (it’s not just British weather that seems to have taken a turn for the bipolar recently, trust me).

Since my last post I’ve been on two school trips, posing as a responsible adult. Truth be told, faced with the prospect of a school trip I still very much want to run to the bus to shotgun the back seat and pull silly faces or wave at passing motorists out of the window. So it was a full time effort to maintain the respectable teacher façade. The first trip was to a very interesting exhibition in Oviedo about the lives of the Iberians. We met in the school foyer ready to leave at 10.30am. Suddenly, a girl raced up to the teacher to tell her that she’d forgotten to get her mum to sign her permission slip. I shook my head in pity, knowing from personal experience that she probably had a long lonely day sat in the school library doing homework ahead of her. But wait… this is Spain… I should have known… the teacher just shrugged and told her to get on the bus and bring the permission slip another day. When we arrived in Oviedo there were smatterings of snow from the night before so the kids sprinted around, climbing onto rooftops and lobbing snowballs at each other, at buildings and at total strangers. The teachers just looked on, totally nonplussed. The second trip was to the remains of a beautiful pre-Romanesque church. This time, the kids got their kicks out of trying to push each other out of windows and down stairs and running into bars and cafes at random to see if they could steal straws. At one point I tentatively asked the male teacher if perhaps the students should be making some notes or at the very least listening to the guide. He looked at me as if I’d asked him whether flying pigs truly exist, exhaled slowly and said "In theory." But aside from being flipping mental and far from traditionally well-behaved, the students were great company on both trips and we had a lot of fun.

On Saturday a few of us drove to Llanes which is a stunning little coastal town about 55 miles away from Gijon. It was a bloody great day. We parked up and walked along a cliff which provided us with some pretty fantastic views – to my right were the snow-capped peaks of the Picos de Europa, to my left the sea was crashing and smashing against the rocks and straight ahead was the town itself with a little golden beach to boot. This is definitely one of the most special things about Asturias – the sheer variety of the landscape and in such close proximity. We spent a few hours mooching around and taking in the sights, stopping for lunch halfway through. After lunch, we went in search of a landmark that Jean and I in particular have been super keen to see. In Llanes stands the house where they filmed ´The Orphanage’. If you haven’t see it, I’d highly recommend it. Unless you’re of a nervous disposition. I saw it at the cinema when it first came out in 2007 and can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever come quite so close to crying with fear. But it is fantastic. I promise. The road where the house is situated turned out to be full of houses that could have fit the bill – deserted, dilapidated, dark and steeped in scary movie clichés. 

We then jumped back in the car and went in search of an inland beach up in the cliffs and to find some geysers that were rumoured to be in the vicinity. Finding the beach was easy enough but the geysers proved to be slightly more elusive. But we eventually found them and they were well worth the wait… I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about what a geyser actually is or what one would be like but I can tell you now that they were freaking cool. They sounded like sleeping dragons and the force of the spray shooting up through the ground was pretty spectacular. Unfortunately due to the delay in trying to locate them, we ended up having to walk back to the car, through fields and woods, in the fog and rain, in the middle of the countryside, shrouded in darkness. This was far from ideal considering we’d spent a good chunk of the day thinking about horror-film clichés. Eventually we made it back alive and by the time we arrived back in Gijon it was all I could do to crawl into bed with a cup of tea. The sign of a good day well spent.

Last night three of us went to see the latest Almodovar film ‘Los Amantes Pasajeros’. I LOVE Almodovar. I love the non-sensical and risqué style of his films. So to see one of his films in Spain without subtitles was definitely on my Year Abroad checklist. Despite the rest of the world often quoting him as being the face of Spanish film-making, he tends to split opinion pretty drastically on home soil so when I mentioned to a few of my teachers that I was really keen to see his new film they immediately launched into speeches outlining how and why his films are full of bad morals and horrendous stereotyping. On face value, that may be true but it’s all done with tongue jammed firmly in cheek and with more levels of irony than you can shake a stick at. ‘Los Amantes Pasajeros’ was a throwback to the films he made in the 80s during La Movida movement, without the dark and disturbing edge of his some of his more recent films. It was colourful, it was silly, it was incredibly risqué and I loved it.  

About an hour ago I had to get stern with a class for the first time. To be honest I haven’t quite mastered the fine line between ‘I’m your friend’ and ‘but you must respect me’ so the class ended up descending into madness. I rolled up my sleeves and put on my most serious ‘don’t mess with me’ face and told them, in no uncertain terms, that whilst it’s great to be able to have fun in lessons, if they weren’t going to concentrate then we’d sit in silence for the rest of the hour. One of the boys put up his hand and said “Teacher, can I tell I joke?” I told him I didn’t really think it was the appropriate time but if it was relevant and would re-lighten the mood then fine. So he said “What’s the different between work and study?... Don’t ask me! I’m Spanish! I don’t do nothing! Hahahaha”. And the whole class fell about laughing.