The BEST VACATION EVER (part II: on friends, family, pianos and pets)

Before I start, I want to say oops. I started writing this post like two weeks ago, and promptly forgot about it until just now when I wanted to start a post on haircuts. (New post coming soon! Haircuts!)

I honestly don't have that much more to share about my winter break as it was fairly uneventful. I already told you about the couch and the dorky card games. Well, I guess I did visit one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world, but that was second to spending the weekend with some long time college friends.

Because it's hard to take pictures of emotions and all that junk, here's some pictures of some of the things I did over my winter break.

Visited with my family. Honestly, I spent most the break doing this, and as a result forgot to take any sort of group photo. Here's the best I can do without photoshop. Photo credit goes to my sister.

Went hiking in the mountains with these lovely people in Mt Rainier National Park. Actually, we didn't so much go hiking as take a couple short walks, but there were sick people present, and for me at least, the hiking really wasn't the point. 

 (Emma, Paul, Angela, Ashley, Jake, Andrew)

The mountain! (actually it's a volcano)

Played my piano. Okay, technically it isn't mine, but I am the one who plays... Wait, that's not my piano, that's the piano in the small house inside my parent's house. My mom has a doll house which is decorated to look something like our big house, complete with yellow sofas, pianos and Christmas trees. I forgot to take a picture of the real piano.

Photo credit: Celeste

Went to Seattle multiple times for various reasons. It's a nice city, and I shouldn't hate on it too much since I'm probably going to end up living there at some point. 

gazing nostalgically at the Smith Tower

Went hiking by the lake where I worked for two (three? I don't remember) years with the friends I have who are still in the college town. Oh, Bellingham. I miss making solidarity eye contact with the other cyclists in the rain. I feel your pain, man, but it's what we get for being a healthier, greener, better class of people.

Harassed cats. Not only my parents' cat, but my friends' cats too. Did you guys know that string is the most exciting and the most terrifying thing? It's not alive, and yet it moves through the air like a snake! KILL IT.

[picture not available. cuteness overload.]

Anyway, as a whole it was really nice to be back and see everyone. I got to see this little snapshot into everyone's lives--what they're doing, how they're feeling, who they're seeing... It was a little tough too, since I'd been away so long. Things have changed, and it would be silly of me not to admit it. But if my own life can serve as any kind of example, change is almost always good. Let's say 97% of the time (puberty wasn't so fun). I can only hope things don't change so much between now and when I go back for good, but barring an alien invasion or massive lahar and ash flow, I don't see that happening.

The BEST VACATION EVER (Part I: the flight)

For me, the BEST VACATION EVER consisted mostly of sitting on the couch in my parents' living room and playing Magic the Gathering^®  with my brothers. Maybe that speaks to my laziness, or maybe to the awesomeness of Magic, or the luxuriousness of the little yellow loveseat, but really I was just glad to be back with the people I know and love. ^{wow that sounds cheesy} 

If you've been reading this blog, you'll probably know already that it had been well over a year and closer to a year and a half since I had been back to the North American continent. Which really isn't all that unreasonable when you realize that there are five thousand miles (8.000 km), nine time zones, an ocean and a continent between my hometown and my adopted country. 

The flight between the Santiago airport and SeaTac made me remember exactly why I had put off making the trek home. 

Leg 1: My apartment to Madrid

5:00 am, I get up, get dressed, lug my suitcase down 6 flights of stairs and across the street to the bus station. An hour or so later I'm going through security at the little airport here in Santiago and enjoying a 4-euro croissant. Catch the plane and watch the sunrise over Galicia. 

Leg 2: Madrid to Philly

I get off the plane in the Madrid Barajas airport and muddle my way to the right terminal after picking up and re-checking my luggage. I sit and wait to board, checking my itinerary every couple minutes just because I'm anxious like that. I've got two hours to make my next connection in Philly, but the plane, in regular Spanish style, is late. Half an hour, forty-five minutes... We take off an hour and a half after the original departure time, never given a reason as to why we left so late.

The plane ride itself is kinda miserable. I get to sit next to a weird old Spanish man for nine hours who tells me maybe a dozen times about how he doesn't speak English. (Good story bro.) I'm one row back from the bulkhead, where a family of four is sitting. As we land the little girl (maybe 3 or 4 years old) cries so much she makes herself vomit. I'm sure the Chicken-or-Pasta was just as good coming up as going down.

Leg 3: Philly to Seattle Phoenix Denver

I was definitely not the only one doomed to miss a connection in Philadelphia that day. About half the plane seemed to be on their way elsewhere and very few of them accepted this fate with quiet resolve.

As we land, the captain announces that anyone who is making a connection needs to stop by the US Airways table to pick up replacement tickets should they not make their flights. There's a mad rush to get off the plane, and harried airline employees shout us along to the table where a single overwhelmed woman is asking "WHAT'S YOUR NAME? WHERE ARE YOU GOING?" and handing out the new boarding passes. I snatch up my own and follow the crowd to pick up my bag. 

We rush through customs and I compare my new ticket with a girl headed for California. Apparently I'm going to Seattle via Phoenix, leaving tomorrow afternoon. 

Look how far out of the way that is.

The customs guy asks me some questions--what have you been doing, do you have anything to declare... then stamps my passport and says, "Welcome back." I just about start crying. God knows why. Maybe it's the stress or the fact that I've been awake and on planes for about 20 hours so far, or maybe I'm just really happy to be in Philadelphia. 

I rush along, still with my fellow connection missers. I've got about ten minutes before my original flight takes off, a bag to check and an entire airport to cross. After a minute I come to a crossroads. I can either follow the signs to the gates, or go outside to the busses that will take me to my US Airways-subsidized hotel room. A security guard sees dancing back and forth, and asks me where I'm going. I tell him and show him my new boarding pass for tomorrow.

"No, no no," he says. "That's really shitty. You're not gonna catch this one tonight. You're gonna go down that hallway and talk to the lady in the window. Tell her you want to go to Denver. Denver, got it?"

I say okay, and go to talk to the lady in the window. It takes a little explaining, a little finagling, but eventually she gets me on a United flight to Denver at 8:00 am the next day with a connection to Seattle that will get me there early in the afternoon. More than anything I am super relieved that I do not have to have this conversation in Spanish given my loopy mental state.

I take the shuttle bus to the hotel, check in and go to have dinner at the hotel's restaurant. By this point I am super out of it and everything is absolutely hilarious.

Look at this toilet! There's so much water in there! And what's with that little lever? Why is there no button on top?

There are some guys at the bar, talking pretty loudly, and I keep sitting up and looking their way, thinking, "English? I hear English! Is it people I know? Probably! I should go talk to them." and then remembering that oh yeah, I'm in the States. Most everyone speaks English.

Leg 4: Denver to Port Townsend

This last little bit wasn't too bad. I flew out in the morning, had breakfast kind of in Denver, and met my mom at the baggage claim in SeaTac. We stopped for phở in Poulsbo or someplace and oh my goodness it was spicy and salty and amazing. It wasn't too much longer before I was in P-Town once again.

It was a longer trip time-wise than I had been expecting (over 48 hours transit time) but at least it wasn't as though I had work or any other real obligations waiting for me.

It's Port Townsend

Some Places I Went

1. The City of Ourense

A Roman(ish) bridge

Ourense is one of the four Galician Provincial Capitals (along with Lugo, A Coruña, and Pontevedra) located in the southwest corner of the Comunidad Autonoma. It was the last of the Galician capitals that I've visited, and pretty similar in style and architecture to the other three. Ourense's distinctive features are: a gigantic Roman bridge (remodeled in the 1500's), a very gloomy cathedral, and the termas, or hot springs scattered around the town.

The picture to the right is kind of misleading of my experience in Ourense--it absolutely poured down rain the entire time. By the end of the first day, even my knee-high rain boots proved incapable of keeping out the wet. 

Besides the rain, the trip was fairly uneventful. We ate a lot, walked a lot, saw a lot. We also got yelled at by the lifeguard at the termas for not having chancletas (flip-flops). The whole "you're going to spread foot diseases!" argument doesn't really hold water for me, since you have to take them off before you get in the pool. If foot diseases are going to spread, they'll do it in lukewarm non-cholirnated water, not the disinfected floor of the changing room. 

But this is just part of Spain's overall anti-foot fetish.


2. O Carbaliño

inside the casa

O Carbaliño is a little village in the province of Ourense where I went to visit a casa rural with some other Auxiliars and some friends-of-friends who happened to be teachers. 

A casa rural is more than just a "rural house." A casa rural is like a hotel/vacation home that you can rent out for the weekend. Well worth it if you want to have a big weekend get-together when everyone lives in tiny little apartments. There was a lot of eating, a lot of talking, a lot of games and walks and general merriment. I don't like to put on my bragging hat (okay, that's not true) but I will to share these fun facts.

• We visited another castro, one of the biggest ones that has been discovered. 
• Team Anglophile held its own in a Spanish-only scattergories-type game.
• I tried my first queimada.
• And made a cat friend (see the last post for pictures of cats)

Quick digression. What is a queimada? Literally, it means, a "burning" and while there is fire involved (LUME!!) it's a little more than that. The queimada is part ritual, part cocktail. The beverage is a mix of aguardiente, sugar, coffee beans and lemon rind, which is then lit on fire and stirred, while someone reads the traditional conxuro (incantation), which is meant to drive away evil spirits. It's pretty long, but here are a few of my favorite lines:

Farts of the asses of Doom

Bellow of the enraged sea

Useless belly of the unmarried woman

Speech of cats in heat

...

Stop the burning firewater

Becoming so purified

...

Goes down our throats

And we will come free of the evil

You can click this link to read the full thing.


3. Combarro

to give you how small the town is, this streetsign says only, 'street'

This past weekend I went on a little day trip to a village on the Atlantic coast with a couple Auxiliar friends. 

There wasn't a whole lot there besides adorable houses and tourist shops that were suspiciously similar to the ones back in Port Townsend. Lots of cheap shell-type nick-knacks and vaguely celtic stuff.

We walked around for a bit, poked in some of the shops and spent a lot of time waiting for various busses. All in all, not a bad way to spend a Saturday.

cute little houses

Overdue update

Wow, it's been like a whole month since I've posted anything. More than a month. Oops. I could blame it on not doing anything special, but that's not true--I went to the city of Ourense to soak in the hotsprings, visited a casa rural and had my first queimada, had my second Thanksgiving abroad... I could say that I've been doing too much writing, what with November being NaNoWriMo, but I started that late and didn't even "win." I could say that I've just been super busy preparing classes and teaching English, but that's a downright lie. 

No, the real answer is I've been lazy. Ya está. We'll see if I get my act together and actually write something interesting later this month. Hopefully before I leave--

WAIT, WHAT? 

Yes! Before I leave! It's true--I'm going home for Christmas this year! Hooray! I am super looking forward to seeing all my friends and family, my cat, my piano, my wide selection in different sizes of bags... (seriously. I can't justify buying new bags because I have like five different sized bags at home, but it's so inconvenient not having a bag that is just the right size for all the objects I want to take with me to locations X Y and Z)

But yeah. Especially the friends and family part. I'll be flying in on the 18th of December, and flying out the 11th of January. I plan on making a trip to B'ham, probably to Seattle as well, but nothing's really planned yet. Really planning isn't exactly my thing.

Now a couple obligatory pictures:

Ourense in the rain

casa rural in the sun

A cat friend

The City of Culture

Last weekend I visited the "Cidade da cultura" with one of my fellow auxilars. City of culture is not, I think, the best translation, though I´m not sure what else to call this... thing. A cultural center perhaps, but I'm not really convinced. Maybe someone else can give me a name for this place after I describe it a little bit.

The complex is located on top of Gaiás hill just outside the city and consists of half a dozen or so buildings/structures that house a museum, a library (that didn't seem to have that many books), some art exhibits, a concert hall, a café-bar, and a bunch of other odds and ends that I don't know what they are. 

Back in the 1990's, the city of Santiago held a competition to design a facility to house the museum etcetera that I mentioned above. The winner was, by far and away, the most interesting, exciting, and extravagant of the entries. The winner, American Peter Eisenmann, managed to incorporate many of the prominent features of Galicia into his design. Rolling hills, seashells, the plan of the old town of Santiago, and tartans to harken back to the mythical days of the celts (we're pretty sure those days existed). 

This grand design resulted in 10+ years of construction, and many, many reevaluations of the budget. A lot of Galicians are upset over the waste of money (let's not forget about la crisis, folks) on a space that no one really uses because they're not really sure what it's for.

When I went, the facility was surreally empty and although it was pretty, there was a tumble-down, shoddy feel to it. Construction was officially stopped this year, but there are still some big holes here and there that may never get filled in.

It looks pretty from afar at least

Can you spot the hole in the facade?

The shelves of the library are designed to look like a model of the city. They're mostly empty

rust stains from the tartan stripes. Note the construction stuff in the background

One of the denizens of the place. There was also: one employee each in the museum and cafe, some German tourists, and a snail. 

It may not be a City of Culture, but I hope that something is made out of this place some day. It has potential.

What am I even doing here?

I've just started my second year in Spain as and Auxiliar de Conversacion, (or, as all my coworkers call it 'lectora.' Don't know why) and I figure it's about time I explain on here what exactly it is that I do.

One of the funny things about the program is the wide range of responsibilities and expectations the different schools place on their auxiliars. At some schools you're pretty much expected to be a real teacher--planning and executing all your own lessons by yourself, while the regular teacher takes the opportunity to get caught up on their own work. In other places, you're not much more than a reading machine/dictionary, where you are only expected to be an example of correct pronunciation. 

Fortunately, my experience has fallen between these extremes, though much more towards the full-blown teacher end. At both the schools I've worked at, I have had two kinds of classes--straight up English classes, and "bilingual sections" aka content classes taught in a foreign language (obviously English in this case). 

For the English classes, I am expected to prepare my own lessons, usually based on either the current grammar or vocab theme the students are learning about, or a seasonal/holiday/cultural lesson. For the bilingual section classes, I often end up reading from a textbook or other source, or doing a vocabulary lesson or game.

A standard lesson plan looks something like this:

Recipes lesson

3rd of ESO (8th grade)

• Go over command form in English
• brainstorm dish ideas
• pair and write recipes
• share recipes
• early finishers share with other early finishers
• whole group
• extra time? 
• 2-3 min--tongue twister
• 4-10 min--taboo/other game w/ food vocab

And that's it. There's other stuff involved, like stern looks and crowd control, and not laughing when students say snarky/cheeky things, but that's all secondary.

And the obligatory picture:

I went for a walk the other day in Belvis park, one of the many parks in Santiago. For a Spanish city, Santiago is very green. It may have something to do with weather predictions like this one:

Family Vacation

Finally, vacation time is over, and the school year has begun. Since I've been lazy and haven't done much blog-writing I'll talk a little now about some of the adventures I've been on since the last post.

These people came to visit

I was a little busy with private lessons and starting my new job at Lamas de Abade, so I wasn't able to join in on some of the little trips Celeste and Johnny went on, but I did manage to rearrange my schedule enough to make time for a nice little trip to one of my favorite places--Portugal.

I'd already been to Porto, but last time I went it dumped rain the entire time and I missed out on a lot of the things I wanted to see. 

Johnny had gone off on a solo adventure to Barcelona and Marseilles, so for the first couple days it was just Celeste and I to poke around the city of wine and tiles. We got up before dawn to catch the 6am train and watched the sunrise through the smoke of the forest fires that have been ravaging the peninsula. Then, thanks to the magic of time travel changing time zones, we arrived at the hostel at 10am five hours later.

From there on, it was the typical tourist things--go on a tour of the city, meet other tourists and spend money on unnecessary things. 

It's a melon boat with ham sails

After some trial and error, Johnny made his way to the hostel and Celeste set out for this place:

It's Morocco

Johnny and I poked around Porto some more, and saw some pretty awesome stuff, such as:

This little church

A Francesinha

some nice plazas

From there we went to Braga, the little city that Spanish adolescents find absolutely hilarious. (Braga is Spanish for "panties")

If you haven't been to Braga, and you're in the area of northwestern Iberia, it is worth the trip. Once upon a time it was the capital of the Galician kingdom, and before then, one of the outposts of the Roman empire. These days, it's a quiet mid-size town and one of the prettiest places I've been. 

There were roughly 10,000 churches in the city of 100,000, and enough flowers to build another 10,000, if flowers were a viable construction material. And like in Porto, most of the streets and sidewalks were paved with black and white stones, making painting street lines and arrows a thing of the past.

Just a flower garden next to a castle.

The next day we took the bus out of town to the church on the mountain, Bom Jesus. 

The church itself was not that impressive on the inside, but the 600 stairs leading up to it were, and the gardens surrounding it make the trek (or the funicular ride) worth the effort. Each landing on the stairs had a different pattern of black and white tiles, and a fountain of some kind.

Fountains

Gardens

After a long walk back down the 600 stairs, Johnny and I grabbed a quick coffee in the city center, and caught the one and only bus back to Spain by the skin of our teeth. This involved a lot of frantic running around, missing passports (not ours, thank God) and melting icecream. We did make it back to Santiago however, just in time to grab a tapa at the bar down the street.

It wasn't too long after that that Johnny set off for Seattle via Madrid, and Celeste returned from the north of Africa with tan lines and a bag full of dirty clothes. The two of us hung out in Santiago for a few days, with another little trip to Lugo to eat pulpo and watch fireworks at San Froilan. The quantity of octopus eaten at the festival is incredible. I find it amazing that the fishermen are capable of finding and catching so many tons of octopus each year and shipping it to this random inland city. 

Ecological ramifications aside, it was a fun experience, and nice to catch up with some old and new Lucences.

After one final night out on the town in Santiago, Celeste jetted off once again for sunnier climes leaving Meghan behind in the comforting drizzle of the northwest.