Shower Door Disaster

I was having a shower and completely minding my own business, when suddenly the shower door literally LEAPT off its sliders. I put one part back on, but then another bit fell off, in some sort a comedy-show-style that simply wasn’t amusing after working an 11 hour day. This caused me to enter Basil Fawlty mode, and I promptly began shouting a veritable rainbow of foul language at the offending contraption. However, I overestimated the thickness of the walls between mine bathroom and the rest of the flat. Result? Fernando and Letti now think I am insane. I think it’s good they have found out early on.

Bathroom Buddies

So, I share a bathroom with one person. He’s called Diego and he’s really nice, but we seem to have different views on things, which is a subtle way of saying that he thinks everything I do is a bit odd.

My first day here, Diego sat me down and gave me a long talk of how to “work” the shower door. It is basically on it’s last legs, and falls off a lot, so I have to be really careful with it and not break it. But I’m so clumsy, this is easier said than done.

The next issue that arose involved a map. I will always hotly defend womankind when people say that women in general are terrible at reading maps, but I must confess that it seems to be a law of nature that after “reading” a map I almost always walk in completely the wrong direction. It’s just a fact of my life that I have come to accept. My bad sense of direction is a bit complicated here though, as because my Spanish is still suboptimal I can ask for directions, but it’s pretty unlikely that I will understand a response. In order to try and rectify this situation, I stuck a metro map up in the bathroom to look at while I was brushing my teeth, not thinking that Diego would have a problem with this. A few hours later there was a soft knock at my door.

“Humphries. What’s with the thing you have put up in the bathroom?”. He then preceded to inform me that our bathroom is the “guest bathroom”, and therefore I should “stop being weird”, or at least put a “laminated” map up, so that it looks “neat”.

I’ve spent long enough trying not to be weird to learn two facts. Firstly, being “normal” is boring, and secondly, it’s a pointless waste of energy as it’s a pretty impossible task. Love me the way I am, or not at all, my friend.

Having said that, I’ve taken his feelings into consideration and have taken the map down. At school I have access to a laminator...

New Flat!

Finally moved into the new flat yesterday! It’s so nice to actually live somewhere, with the knowledge that you may actually be living there for some time! I’m a bit of a “nester” at heart. I like to stick things on the wall, and have a food cupboard bursting with food...It makes me feel better about the big bad world outside. (I’m sick of thinking things like “wow. That’s a really good deal for that product. Bargain. But I can’t buy them as I’ll just have to transport them to a new place” etc etc.) Now I can finally buy a kettle and really feel at home!

Body Language

An important lesson I learned while living with the Spanish girls was that you don't have to speak the same language as someone to show your disdain for them. Nata was really great, but even though I couldn’t understand what Ana was saying, she made it pretty clear that she didn’t think very much of me. I can understand her point of view. Some foreign girl moves into your flat for a month or two, seems to be asleep all the time, and you can't really understand what she says. Conclusion: some weirdo you don't really want to associate with too much in your life. Sad, but understandable.

One particular day, there was someone else coming to check out the room, and she joked with me about how we “should tell them we all go to bed at 9pm” to which I should have replied “and that we never do our dishes either?”, but sadly didn’t. I’m sure she meant well, but about an hour later I was watching a film and she came in the living room with the new guy. She casually opened my last two beers, which she poured for herself and her new friend, then preceded to tell me that the film which she had borrowed from me was really terrible.

It was the end of a long week. I went to my room, got dressed and went for a walk. While I was getting ready she knocked on the door, saying she thought the beers were hers and Nata’s. The damage was done! I was dressed by this point, so I walked to the nearby park which has a great view of the city and a random Egyptian temple. On the way, I bought a big can of beer from a Chinese shop.

I have rarley felt more alone than I did on that Thursday night, outside the Templo De Debod in the park near my house, quietly crying into my supersized can of Mahou.

I watched various people on their tours of the park, feeling entirely miserable, and then I saw something out of the corner of my eye. A man who had been running in the park was now lying on the bench adjacent to mine, vigorously waving his legs in an amusing fashion. I burst out laughing, and he came and sat next to me. (I later found out from a friend that it is virtually impossible for a woman to sit in a park on her own in Madrid no matter how intently she is reading; a man will always come and harass her). The man was fairly amusing, and gave me his details to go for “tea” with him, but even in the twilight I could tell he was at least 35, and moreover, no self respecting Spanish person pretends to prefer tea to coffee. I was reticent about contacting him, and then I lost his phone number when I moved house (which was probably for the best for all concerned).

Living with the Spanish girls for a month was really cool in some ways. I can now add "You're really skinny for a British person" to my top 10 favourite complements. However, when you are a “temp” in a job, some people don’t bother to talk to you. Imagine living in that kind of environment.

No Substitute

I work with Sexto, year six, which is split into 3 classes. My teachers all seem really great but I´m having some problems disciplining the children. I think that it is safe to say that Spanish people in general are very confident and assertive (compared to us shy Brits) and I´m find it difficult to get them to be relatively quiet.

However, my biggest headache at the moment is that I’m expected to take the whole of 6A as they do not have a permanent supply teacher. The teachers who are filling in from other departments tend to speak no English, so they can’t tell me what I have to do. When faced with a whole class of children, while there is a qualified (if non-English speaking) teacher in front of me, I really feel the difference between me and a qualified teacher. I’m finding the TEFL module at uni really useful, but I’m also experiencing the sensation that it only scratches the surface of teaching; there is a reason why people study for several years to become teachers. I'm not really sure how to say "I'm not paid enough to be a 'proper' teacher"...

The flat in Arguelles is nice, but it is so far from school (50 minutes, door-to-door) and one week I was late 3 times and got in a lot of trouble. Subsequently after that, I rushed to school, and put my MP3 player in an outside pocket of my backpack. Needless to say, it’s been stolen, which is a shame as it was really useful for listening to Spanish learning materials on the way to school. However, with my MP3 player stolen it means I can concentrate on my verb table revision cards. (F*ck my life?).

No Penis. Period. (HELP!)

I’m a very proud person, and refuse to ask for help until the very last moment (usually when it’s too late!), so I insisted that I would do EVERYTHING myself. However, the tiredness has been really building up, so I’ve been making really stupid embarrassing mistakes.

The Spanish language is specifically designed to trip up the unwitting foreigner, so ofcourse it stands to reason that the word for chicken (“pollo”) is very similar in pronunciation to the word for penis (“poya”). It is a fatal error to walk up to a butcher’s counter thinking “Don’t say penis. Don’t say penis. Don’t say penis”. You will ask for penis when you mean to ask for chicken, and what’s worse, you will walk away from the counter empty-handed.

Also, if you don’t know how to ask for a monthly metro pass, you will also inadvertently ask some poor bugger for a period of a more menstrual variety. But no one will laugh this time as you are holding up the ticket buying queue with your tomfoolery.

If I was the kind of person who depended on the help of others, I think my life, and those of the people I come into contact with, would become very boring. However, I finally plucked up the courage to ask Ana for a bit of help with my NIE. She called the number I had been given while I watched, but told me that there was an answer phone message saying I had to “sign in online”. This didn’t make much sense as you need the NIE number to actually sign in. I know the system is completely messed up, but I also know that this is the phone number that other people have used to make their appointment. Could Ana just be fobbing me off? No, I'm just paranoid. She has no reason to do that, surely...

But seriously, what the fuck am I going to do? You can’t get a bank account without a NIE, and you can’t get paid without a bank account. This situation is getting dire now!

Commencing The Beauraucratic Odyssey

The coordinator at my school phoned a mysterious number for me, and after a short phone conversation in which I was casually asked whether my Chinese visa refusal was due to criminal convictions (if only it was something so glamorous), I made an appointment to receive some “help”. Luckily, Roselle (who has been studying Spanish at University and so attended the ‘Induction’) didn’t have the faintest idea what we were supposed to do either.

We arrived at the Bilingual Programme office 20 minutes late as they had misprinted the address in the ‘Introduction Pack’. I should have taken this to be a bad omen, but instead I entered the building with a smile on my face and hope in my heart. After about 30 seconds, it became clear that Irena had no idea about my “special situation”, and she seemed appalled that I had been allowed anywhere near Spain (or her office) without being able to speak at least intermediate level Spanish. After chastising me for not coming to the induction, and also helpfully highlighting my own countries bureaucracy problems, she then preceded to explain that the entire NIE system in Spain is screwed up due to cut backs in staff as a result of the recession, and that it would be pretty difficult to get this magic piece of paper that proves that you exist.

Nevertheless, she commenced phoning numbers from the websites for us. At the end of each number there was an answering machine playing a helpful and informative message, detailing the next number to ring. After phoning 5 numbers, she printed off an official looking form, assuring us that everything would be ok if we just went to this random place really far away and filled in some other forms. Dubious, but ready to explore the city, we set off.

After 50 minutes of walking in the baking sun, and following the directions of various gnarled old men (“turn left at the roundabout, pass the insane asylum and the old prison...”. Have we actually stepped into the start of a horror movie?), we made it to the Commiseriat.

It was quite difficult to tell that the building was a police station, as it was bright yellow, with what looked like a large circus tent at the back. Thankfully, we spotted a steady stream of Chinese and Mexicans on their pilgrimage to and from the back of the big top tent, so we knew we were probably in the wrong place, as places that catered for non-EU immigrants usually weren’t in the mood to complete paperwork for people who could not be deported and therefore were “non-urgent” cases. At the front gate of the compound, a rather grumpy young man informed us that the department we wanted was closed at 12.30; his facial expression denoted that we were obviously idiots for thinking anyone working in an office could be bothered with dealing with stupid immigrants after lunch.