My Spanish Life

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you are all having a wonderful time celebrating with your families and filling your bellies full of delicious food. Today was just a normal day for me here. I didn’t think it would bother me to not be home for Thanksgiving, but it did a little bit. I miss the tradition and the holiday, being with family, and eating a huge feast. I also missed watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade! I tried to stream it online but only caught the tail end of it (at least I saw Santa!) I will be having a Thanksgiving celebration on Sunday with some good friends here though, but I’ll write more on that later.

Today I wanted to talk about my life in Spain. I am working in a high school in a pueblo called Coria del Río (it’s about a 30 minute drive from Seville). I teach English on Monday through Thursday mornings to students ages 11-15, and in all different subjects: English, math, science, gym, and music. All I do in the math and science classes is read out loud in English and the students repeat after me to practice their pronunciation. It is actually really boring, for me and for the students. I love my English classes though – I have really fun students, and I get to make presentations for them, and teach them different things every week. They are curious and very talkative students.

The discipline in Spanish schools is very different than back home…meaning there really isn’t any. The students aren’t really bad by any means; they just like to talk a lot. I feel like half of the class period is spent by the teacher shushing the students so they can hear what she or I have to say. Sometimes it’s frustrating, but for the most part I love it.

I also teach private English lessons in the afternoons. I have eight different students, and they are all at different levels. One of them I meet twice a week in a bar in a cool part of Sevilla, called Alameda (it’s similar to East Grand Rapids), and the others are families in another pueblo called Tomares (about a 15 bus ride from Sevilla). I enjoy some of my private lessons very much, but there is one family that I struggle with every time I’m there. To them I am a glorified babysitter – I go to play with the kids for two hours (3 kids: a five year old boy and two seven year old twin girls) and speak with them only in English. It sounds like it would be easy and fun, right? Wrong. The kids are the most ill-behaved children I have ever met. On the first day one of the girls slapped me in the face! Her mom was so angry (I was too!), and sent her daughter to bed by 5:00. It’s gotten better, but they are just brats. The treat me like a jungle-gym, or a doll, or any other kind of toy. They don’t listen to me or obey me in any way.  The mom is a teacher, so you would think she would control her children more like she would her students. This is also wrong; she stays in the same room as us the whole time I’m there, but still does nothing to stop her little monsters. It’s awkward for me to discipline the children in front of her. I hate going over there every week, but I need the extra money, so I don’t really have a choice.

I spend the majority of the day speaking in English (because of my school and lessons), but the evenings and in-between times are all in Spanish. I’m learning so many new words and phrases every day. It’s overwhelming to think of how much of the language I don’t know and still have yet to learn. But I’m improving, poco a poco.

I am in love with this city. I treasure the fact that I’m actually here, living my dream! I love walking around the city and exploring new areas, or going back to my favorite hotspots. I especially enjoy the city at night. The bars and restaurants are always full late into the night, and the lights, architecture, and landscape turn Sevilla into a special metropolis that I revel in. It’s crazy to think how quickly my time here is flying by, and that I only have 7 months left until I return home. I have so much learning, improving, and exploring to still do in those few shorts months!