Finally, A Good Lesson

Today was a great teaching day. The first reason for this is because I finally decided to script my entire lesson, which was a bitter pill to swallow put in the end ensure that I had (almost) no stumbling moments with the class.

But the real difference-maker is that we (meaning including me) were finally with the intermediate-level students today, and it was great. I knew it was going to be a good lesson when the students got into pairs without me having to say anything. The beginners were so reticent with their English that they had to be almost literally led by the hand to whatever was happening.

It was really nice to have UNDERestimated the amount of material that students know. I was going to teach them the word "crypt" and all I needed to do was put pictures up on the board and one of the ladies in the class went "oh! (crypt in Spanish)!" and that was all that was needed.

Also, when the students made a mistake, they either immediately corrected it or were at least able to understand when I told them what was wrong.

My favorite part of the lesson was when an elderly Japanese woman named Keko correctly identified who Wallace Simpson was (and Edward too-we were studying "love affairs").

I also foolishly offered a prize to anyone who could pick out Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, and now I have to find something silly to give to one of the students.

In other news, last night my flatmates and I went out to a "pasta bar" and I had the same dinner-pasta with pesto sauce-that I was going to make at home, except now I got to pay $10 euro for the priviledge. But that's not necessarily fair; the pasta WAS very good. It's right around the corner from me, in the George Orwell plaza (!). I'll probably make it back there again soon.

My flatmate now believes that Jews control the weather. They caused the tsumani and they caused the extra-snowy winter everybody had. The base of operations is somewhere in Antarctica. It certainly IS sunny in South Florida this time of year, but isn't that a chicken-or-egg scenario? i.e. did the Jews move there and THEN made the weather nice, or did they move to West Palm Beach BECAUSE they had already created favorable conditions for themselves?

It looks like Opening Day for baseball isn't that big here after all. One of the students was surprised when I told him that the USA was the best baseball nation in the world. His guess was Cuba. What would the word for that be: lingocentrism? Ethnocentrism? That doesn't seem right. However, opening day pitcher (and Cuban national) Livan Hernandez, one of the most mediocre pitchers ever, would certainly be happy to hear such things.

I have an April Fool's "joke" but the punchline might last longer than 4/1.

Fuck This, I'm Using the Laundromat

Doing laundry in my flat here is a waste of time, effort, clothes, and patience. Now I know that not having real cleaning facilities might constitute a "first world problem", but here me out. It's one thing to have to hang your clothing up on a hangar outside and let it dry in the air. It's another for those clothes to have to be hung up forty feet above a ceiling-less outdoor patio in someone's flat below.

Also, the owner of my flat has purchased a washing machine, which seems like a grand idea except a washer without a dryer is pretty stupid especially when you only have a vague idea of how it works. The landlady showed me how to use it except my clothes came out soaking wet.  I think there was a wrong button pushed somewhere along the way.

 I have a feeling its going to take at least a week for these clothes to be wearable.

But then it gets worse as there's people who live downstairs and were none too happy that my clothes were dripping down to the bottom of their floor. THere is a plastic covering protecting some, but not all, of the room from overhanging clothes. I have no idea what they do when it rains, it looks to me like they might be able to close the roof. However, i heard them swearing in Spanish when they noticed that it wasn't raining, it was just one of the students upstairs doing his laundry.

The worst part happened when my underpants fell off the clotheshanger and dropped all the way down the patio. The natives swore again and then laughed. I think I just lost those underpants forever. I'm not going to try to recollect them.

Now that I know I'll be responsible for my own detergent as well, I think it just makes more sense at this point to go find a laundromat. I'll get some good reading time in at least.


In other news, I am finally finished with the beginner-level students. This is mostly excellent news. I will regret not being able to build upon any progress I made in teaching them, and also there were students who told me they could understand me better. But overall, it just seemed incredibly difficult to get anything across the language barrier: the problem here was that the MY learning was supposed to be skills based, which basically means as a "teacher" I was handicapped because I couldn't use Spanish, even my horrible garbled unintelligible Spanish, during the lesson.

I understand why they do this and I am glad that I was forced to have to use word economy and non-verbal communication, but at the same time it made it very difficult for me to teach them anything, and my "creative" lesson today seemed to be dead on arrival.

The trickiest thing is that I felt like I was screwed if I made just one mistake, because it wouldn't be interpreted as such. If, for example, a math teacher put up "6 + 6 = 483" or an English teacher told you Shakespeare wrote Jane Eyre, you'd know it was a goof, but the students in the class seem to take things verbatim and because our communication skills across the language barrier are bad, not only is the mistake disastrous, but it's compounded because I can't explain my own mistake to the class.

Today I wrote things on the board which were not a mistake, but in fact turned out to be a bad way to explain something. The problem is that the damage had already been done and it was extremely hard for us to "go back" to the beginning of the lesson because they can't follow that trail if I speak only in English.

I should also mention that will I did like some of my "students", there were also a handful which were just obnoxious and had "given up" on me by last Friday. So they sat in the corner, passive-agressively ignored my lesson, and made full class participation impossible.

The class was able to convey that you cannot take a train from New York to Barcelona. At least they learned that much.

It will be a tremendous pleasure to be able to teach students who have a better grasp of the English language.

The positive spin here is even if I wind up teaching beginner-level students somewhere, if it's a Spanish country I'll be able to use the L1 (primary language) AND I know kind-of-sort-of have skills to be able to convey meaning even more simply. Also, if I am truly teaching beginners, I will be able to completely control the lesson, instead of working around other people's lessons and the actual professional teaching given by the actual instructors at the IH school.

A Very Brief and Spotty Culinary Lesson: Catalan Tapas

I've only been here a week, but I think I can make some basic generalizations about food here, or at least food in the Gothic Quarter.

There are not different kinds of meat, just different kinds of pork. Thankfully I was not raised orthodox. There's tons of seafood all around, but most of the chicken or beef I've seen around either looks gross or is. The thing to eat here is "tapas", which are basically just small appetizer-portions of things, some of which you see everywhere.

*Patatas Bravas-these are everywhere. "Brave Potatoes" are just wedges with some kind of pink sauce which varies in quality, from a gross cheese-whiz type consistency to actual tomato-based sauce. In theory they're supposed to be spicy?

*Pinchos Murados-I had Moorish-style kabobs the other day and it was the most disgusting thing I'd eaten all year. I think that these are good in some places, but the cafe I was ate served me these cubes of seasoned pork fat and it was just chewy and weird and 2.50 euro I could never take back.

*Xorico-the best kind of pork sausage they have here. It's just the catalan word for chorizo and I haven't really had a bad experience with it yet. The best was a full xorico sausage link which was in some kind of red wine reduction. It was delicious.

*(Green Peppers with Salt)-I've taken to ordering this at a few places, I think they're pimientos but I can't really remember, but either way, they sort of serve them like you would pickles at a deli. They're salted, and I like putting them either on chorizo or bread. These are also supposedly "spicy."

In other news, I ordered take-out from a mediocre japanese noodle house down the street. The real problem with this place is you can't call in, you have to actually show up there, which to me defeats the purpose of take-away. I had to stand alone like an idiot for ten minutes at the doorway; the whole idea was so that I didn't eat in a restaurant alone, but just standing in a restaurant alone isn't much better.

In other news, I walked from Parc Guell down back to the Sagrada Familia and then back to my flat in about an hour.

Aaron Versus The Old Fart

A conservative geezer named Joaquin (who looks like Brian Cox) derailed my otherwise successful lesson when he just had to ask why English-speaking people use the "t" and "d" sounds in the past simple tense. For example, at the end of "watched", we make the "t" sound, but at the end of "bamboozled", we make the "d" sound.

I know what the answer is-where the sound is made, in either the throat or the mouth-but to try to explain something that is confusing FOR English-speakers, to people who don't even have 100 words of English vocabulary between them, seems fairly impossible.

I should have said "shut the fuck up Joaquin" or, the more diplomatic and teacher-appropriate "that is a very good question, and we will get to this at a later date (even though we won't)."

But I equivocated and tried to do both things, mumbling about how difficult phonemes are and then trying to teach it anyway. It was just a complete mess, the class understandably gave up on trying to figure out what I was saying, and started talking amongst themselves. Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, I was bailed out when my tutor Roger finally came up to the front of the classroom and explained in his way why we use certain sounds, although I swear I don't think any of them understood what he said either.

It's one thing to teach something well and quite another for people to actually understand what they were taught.

In other news, the CELTA people are mostly fun, but this whole idea of not eating and just buying beers is starting to wear thin. I know we're all a bunch of cheap young people, but going from 12 in the afternoon to 4 in the morning with nothing but beer and sometimes wine is no way to go through life in Barcelona. Last night, we wandered close by to the school, which was kind of lame, and went to some cool bars, but when some of us tried to get the group to sit down at a restaurant, they balked and we wound up never actually going somewhere that served edible food. My dinner last night was peanuts and really bad empanadas which were overpriced and disgusting.

I discovered a beer here called "damm lemon" which is fantastic, for me at least. I have no idea whether it is considered a good beer or not, but it's kind of a mix between beer and lemonnade, and it was great. I can't really be bothered at this point to try to understand the palate differences between ales and lagers and stouts, etc. I know "bad" Bud Light beer tastes like water or tastes like crap, but as far as the "beery" taste of beer, I wouldn't know what to look for in a competition, other than perhaps whether it was made in Germany.

So all of that is just to say that I like the crazy beers which taste like beer and something else entirely. Like chocolate beer. Or a beer ice cream float. Or "Beez Kneez" which was an extra-sweet honeywheat flavored beer I had in Australia.  Or, in Barcelona, Damm Lemon.

Today is going to be an adventure because a few of us left all my important things with a girl named Kelly who has no phone, no computer, and doesn't know her own address, but allowed us to drop our school crap off with her before going out last night. We were all supposed to meet at 12 to go to the parque Guell but I woke up at 12:45. I'll head over there now and hopefully I'll run into them. If not, I might start knocking on random doors on Carrer Trafalgar.

Day Three: My Flatmate Has Interesting Opinions and Teaching is Hard

Overall, my apartment is fairly nice. However, there are things which made it sad place yesterday (and this morning).
First of all: darkness 24-7, especially in the staircase. Sunlight has a difficult time penetrating the tight spaces of the Barre Gotico flats. My room, for example, looks out onto a tiny 7x7 inner courtyard so it in perpetual twilight even during midday. At least this encourages me to get some fresh air outdoors.
Also, my room looks across towards the bathroom, whic his fine when I use it but when someone someone else uses it I have to either close the windwos or otherwise just muddle through the peepshow.
The internet stoped working last night. I was cut off from the world and that made me very angry for about an hour before I decided to go bed.
Most importantly, one of my flatmates is crazy. His brain is rotting inside his head from all the conspiracy theories he is keeping up there.
Valerio believes in the following:
·the illuminati
·a secret cabal of weathermen in Britain who are accurately predicting everything, including the exact hour of the recent tsunami in Japan.
·Al Gore invented global warming...AND George Bush planned 9-11. How is that for non-partishanship?
·all politicians win fixed elections, a result of secret world ¨puppetmasters¨, probably Jews
·Speaking of the Jews, they planned the Holocaust. It was staged and exaggerated by that most pernicious of secret Jews, Adolf Hitler, to ensure that nobody would be able to criticize their postwar machinations-scheming ever ever again. But it hasn´t worked, obviously, because as Valerio has proven, THEY HAVE FOUND OUT OUR SECRET.
Valerio is very nice. He bought me and the other flatmate, Tony, wine and offered us part of an omelette he made for dinner. But he scared me last night and the day before he was acting like a creepy bastard towards the other girls in my class. He is not even IN my class, having graduated last Friday from the 4'week teacher training course, but he is still hanging out at the school to use the internet and (mainly) to creep on the girls. Valerio leaves in three days. The countdown began when he said Bill Hicks was killed by the government because he ¨knew too much.¨ Now I know too much...about Valerio.

.......

Almost every day we are ¨taught¨by being teachers ourselves. This week I my group was dealing with beginner-level English students. It was a learning experience for both student and teacher then, as it did not go extremely well. I think people learned some new words-phrases, so it was a success overall, and I was at least, proud that somehow I conveyed to them some vocab about family and friends.
Although there are a few people in their early twenties or younger, at least half of the class are older students who are trying to learn English because they are unempoyed or retired and figured now was as good a time as any to learn English, probably so they could watch Starship Troopers in the language it was meant to be understood.

The stupidest individual mistake I made was writing ¨my best friend is a chess board¨ (instead of player) on the wall. Now, this could just have meant that you are insular and calculating, but this kind of abstract metaphor is probably not a useful thing to teach beginner students.

Apparently, i talk too much. I was dressed down, although not in an angry way, by MY teacher because he said I was using too many words during the lesson and it just stressed out the students who had no idea what I was saying. Word economy is going to be hard because when I´m nervous I´d prefer to talk rather than fidget. Can I do neither? I guess we´ll see.

Day One: Duh, Losing!

When you have dreams that you are being robbed in the middle of a city street, it means your brain is coding your subconscious fear of losing control or being emasculated, perhaps, if you are man.

When are robbed in the middle of a city street in reality, it just means you are about to have a shitty, shitty, day.

After safely being a tourist for 22 years even in the “bad” part of cities like Baltimore, Sydney and West Palm Beach, within 20 minutes of arriving in Barcelona people tried to take everything I owned.

I have read about how to be careful and not look like a tourist. The reports are inconclusive about my ability to blend in physically as a native Catalan, but nevertheless, when I open my mouth it is obvious I am a tourist, and when you have three pieces of luggage you are hauling slowly down the street there is not much you can do to be discrete.

I am living in the old Gothic District of Barcelona, which is kind of cool, but the streets are very narrow and winding in many places, which makes it ideal to walk around and view the shops, cafes, and well-preserved history…if you have nothing in your pocket except an ipod and six euro, or if you are a thief you is trying to rob American tourists.

The worst thing was that I was literally 5 feet away from my flat in Calle Llibreteria when it happened. I was so close to safely depositing my things.

So I was hauling my crap past Café Farggie when some man comes up to me that I all of the sudden had melted gelati covering my jacket and luggage and shoes and pretty much everything I own.  This should have been a dead giveaway in the first place, perhaps, but I wasn’t really focused on critical thinking skills at that point. I now know that if someone informs you that you have spilled some kind weird shit all over yourself, the thing to do is either kick them in the balls, or run as fast as you can away, or both. So I took off my jacket, the man offered to get me some napkins, and meanwhile, someone else filched my case which had my laptop and passport inside, among other valuable things. I ran after that one, because it was the most important, and had to leave my other two bags outside the café.

Instinctively I did what you are supposed to do, which is run after the guys with the laptop, scream a lot of American swear words, and scream a lot of other useful explicatives “help!”, “get back here!” and “policia!”. About fifteen seconds into my chase the two men who were running ahead of my dropped the bag. I grabbed that one, and ran back to where my other luggage was…gone as well, and then people told me where they had gone, so I tried to run that down for a few blocks.

I am not sure at this point what actually happened, except that people, including Britishers on a bus tour by the old cathedral pointed out where robbers had gone. I can’t tell if they were just slow to act or just incredibly useless but if I saw someone running down the street with a bag, even if it wasn’t mine I would yell for the police or run them down.

But either way, I was in 100% freakout mode, bugging out and desperately stalking the city block for my stuff. I returned to the scene of the crime and noticed an old lady carrying my bag slowly up the street. Once I got closer and saw that it was indeed my clothing bag, I started screaming at the lady and almost knocked her to the ground in my attempt to get it back. She did not speak English or even good Spanish, so in Catalan she confused asked me what was going on, as I took the bag away from her and yelled that it was mine. At least I didn’t use the c word, although for her the c word could have been “cookies” and she still wouldn’t know what I was talking about. Other ladies from the café came to join her and we had a bad, useless conversation where we tried unsuccessfully to bridge the language gap. I sort of figured out finally that this woman had been taking the bag to the police, so I felt like an idiot, apologized profusely, and then tried to figure out if they knew anything about the third bag, which had assorted goodies like my Spanish phone, computer power cord, and NY Times book of Sunday crossword puzzles. We didn’t get very far.

At this point I decided to go to my apartment and give up on the last bag. It was an unfortunately whiney and high-maintenance introduction on my part, although I felt bad because both my flatmates and the owner of the apartment, a lady named Marga, were horrified. A fellow CELTA student from Gibraltar, a middle-aged man named Tony, offered to help me file a police report, which we did. I spent the next hour and half commiserating with my flat mates (in the apartment there is me, Tony from Gibraltar, a guy whose name I forget from Rome, the landlady Marga, and her 137-year old mother). I called my parents and tried to figure out what was missing, since I wasn't actually sure. I also then tried to scrape the melted ice cream shit off everything, which was gross.

Sometime just before the afternoon, we went to the police to see if something had turned up, and somehow, through a miracle of divine justice, the police not only had my third bag, but nothing had been stolen from inside.

I don't know whether to be flattered or relieved that the robbers decided there was nothing in my bag worth stealing. I guess they look inside saw a bunch of clothing they weren't going to wear and books they couldn't read, and felt it wasn't worth the effort. They did miss the phone and camera, both of which must have had some black market value, but I'm not complaining.

So finally, by 1 in the afternoon I was reuinited with every last possession I had brought with me (except for a pack of kleenex) despite having endured more stress than all of the previous year combined, if not more.

I know I should be greatful, and I am, but honestly I was pretty pissed that even though I had to endure none of the consequences of a robbery, I had to feel all of the anxiety.

In fact, having had the things all return to me just made my experience more confusing and surreal. I was too afraid to leave the apartment for five hours, and then when I finally made it back out onto the street, I just felt very detached from reality and wandered aimlessly around the Gothic Quarter and the waterfront for two hours, until at some point I got too hungry and ate an overpriced udon noodle dinner.

Then I got locked out of my apartment and could not get in. I tried turning the key for about forty minutes, then I had to use the bathroom. The locals working around the history museum were not helpful and very unfriendly. Why, even though there wasn't a "bano publico" in the area, couldn't those bastards have just mentioned that ten meters away there was a cafe with a toilet downstairs? Was that too much of a thing to mention for someone? I was even trying to speak Spanish. Eventually I had to ask the police to let me into my own flat, which was humiliating but at least I was able to finally get to my bed, which I very happily fell asleep in at around 8 in the evening. I did not wake up for 12 hours.

In conclusion, day one was a failure to launch from the very first minute. It's never a good thing when the best part of your day is being happy going through customs didn't take as long as you thought it would. Even my breakfast ham sandwich at the airport was bad.

i suppose we all have days like this. THe only problem is, when you know you are having a really bad day, how to do damage control and just let it pass over you without too badly scarring you. I think in that regard, I may have succeeded. By day three, I was already using my camera and being a bad tourist.

Also, I don't care who, if someone spills ice cream on me again while I am here,  am kicking them hard in the groin, running away very quickly, or shanking them with the nearest long stick-like object i can find, even if that is a coffee stirrer. I am ready. Bring it on.

Or don't. Maybe that would be better.