Week two in Gijón and the time seems to be flying.
I’m finding it to be
a very explore-able city so far. There are bus stops everywhere and about 20
different bus lines in all, which all seems a bit unnecessary because everything’s
within walking distance of everything else anyway! The streets are mostly laid
out like a massive grid, so it’s almost impossible to get yourself so lost that
you can’t find your way back again. It’s struck me that in Real Everyday Life,
time rarely allows for the luxury of getting lost. If you get lost, it means
you’ll be late somewhere or you’ll miss something and it nearly always causes a
downright convenience. Here in Year Abroad land, I've found myself with time to
spare so wandering aimlessly is something I've indulged in a LOT. In the last
few weeks, I've clocked up a good few hours of getting lost. It’s becoming a
game – seeing how long I can wander before I have to yield and pull out the map
to check where on earth I am. Once or twice, it’s turned out I’m at the
complete opposite end of the city to where I was expecting. I reckon the buildings
just get up and relocate themselves a few blocks away every now and then,
y’know? That’s where the buses come in handy. It’s quite liberating to jump on
a bus that seems to be heading in vaguely the right direction and just see what
happens.
My school is great. The kids are all incredibly friendly and
are thrilled to have a real live English person in their midst, which has
really taken me aback – I was almost expecting hostility or, at best,
indifference. I've been with 6 different groups in the course of a week, ranging
from 11 to 16 years old. Regardless of their age, there are a few seemingly
essential basics that they need to get out of the way before we can form any
kind of bond. “Do you like Justin Bieber?” “Who do you support, Barca or
Madrid?” “Do you watch MTV?” I learnt very quickly that my answers to these
questions would be the making or breaking of me. By the third lesson I’d
developed a sort of alter ego, fine tuning my answers to get the best possible
reaction from them “Hi! I’m Sian, from England. I love Barca football team,
paella and everything about Spain, particularly Gijón. My favourite film is The
Hunger Games and my favourite sport is handball. I love The Big Bang Theory. I
don’t like Justin Bieber one bit. My favourite band is The Script. My favourite
actress is Penelope Cruz.” It’s not all strictly true, but seeing their blank
faces at the mention of Emma Thompson, Dr Who and Newton Faulkner was too much
to handle.
It’s not all sitting around having a good old chinwag though
- that’s just the safe haven of the English classes. Something I didn't really
realise is that the school runs a bilingual course which means that, if the
students enroll onto it, all of their lessons are taught in English. But they
still have to get to the same standard in each subject as the students who are
learning in their native Spanish. It seems a bit mad to me. The concepts
they’re learning about are hard enough to follow, let alone having to learn
them in a foreign language. On Tuesday, I was asked to make a presentation on
Neoclassicism and the Culture of Enlightenment in the 17th Century
for next weeks History lesson, whilst yesterday morning I had to delve deep
into the depths of my mind to retrieve words like pipette, burette and
graduated cylinder for a Science lesson. There’s a reason I didn't carry on
with either of these subjects beyond GCSE. I’m total crap at them. Maybe it’ll
turn out to be a romantic Hollywood-style ending that sees me teaching the
children but at the same time learning a thing or two myself so that we finish
the year in a slow motion, soft focus montage depicting how we've grown
together. Maybe they’ll all fail their exams because of me. Fingers crossed for
the former.
I've had a few nights out on the tiles of Gijón, which have
all been highly enjoyable. The other language assistants in the city are all
lovely and we've formed a nice little group. We went to another university
faculty party last weekend, this time the medics. But when we arrived most of
the party-goers were younger than my brother, which was hugely disconcerting
(it’s legal to drink in Asturias from the age of 16. I know, right?!) so we
returned to the little seafront bars in the city where we found some grown-ups.
In terms of speaking Spanish, I’m not doing as much as I
should be. If you get me started in a good one-on-one conversation, I can just
about hold my own. I’ve managed to maintain a good few conversations about all
sorts of serious things: politics, long distance relationships, the education
system, you name it. But catch me off-guard and you’d think I’d never had a
Spanish lesson in my life. I was paying with my card in a shop the other day
and the lady asked to see some ID – not particularly complicated, especially
seeing as the Spanish word is ‘identificación’ – but she might as well have
asked in Chinese (or Russian for that matter). After asking her repeat herself
about 5 times I eventually got the jist and managed to pull my passport from my
bag but by that point I was shaking, sweating, on the verge of tears and redder
than a baboons bum with the stress and embarrassment of it all. Never mind.
Practice makes perfect I suppose.
I’m looking forward to becoming more of a fixture at the
school and my timetable includes a 3-day-weekend so hopefully a bit of
travelling will be possible in the next few months.
That's all for now. Don’t be a stranger, eh?
X
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