Cartagena gets cold

This weekend saw a sudden change in the weather – it went from being pretty nice to downright cold. As I sit huddled in my room in far too many layers I have come to the unexpected conclusion that I prefer winter in England. Here is why:

1. It’s consistent. Back home, if you wake up in November and it looks cold outside, then chances are it’ll be cold all day. You can safely wear your knitted jumper and know that you’ll be keeping it on all day.
   Here, when I leave the house at 7.30 to be at school for 8am (and I thought 9am lectures were early!), it is cold enough to need aforementioned knitted jumper and whatever else winter attire I feel like. But fast-forward to 2pm when I leave school again, the sun is shining, meaning I have to shed the layers and end up carrying half my winter wardrobe with me as I slowly roast under the long sleeved top that seemed like a good idea first thing in the morning.
2. There is central heating. I’m not sure whether it’s just the apartment I’m living in or whether this is common in Spain, but there is no central heating here. No radiator to huddle against or warm pipes running through my room to spread some heat. I have to admit that this has led to me wearing my body warmer inside. I am yet to resort to the gloves but my hands are so cold that I feel it is only a matter of time. Similarly, there are no carpets, a fact which I’m sure I’ll love in the summer, but at the moment my poor feet are suffering whenever I forget to wear socks or slippers.
3. I actually have suitable clothing. I admit this is partly my fault, but I didn’t bring much winter stuff with me because my cases were already pretty full and I was worried about going over the weight allowance. Thankfully my Mum visited this weekend and brought me my coat, which has some just-about-functioning gloves in the pockets (they are very thin and I had to sew up a big hole in one of them), but I am still without a scarf or hat. I have considered buying a new scarf but am reluctant to do so when I have a perfectly good one at home, and am hoping to knit myself one soon too. I am just glad that I have enough jumpers and cardigans to last me!
4. It is expected. I realise it is naive of me to say that Spain is always hot – like all countries it has winter! But still… England is supposed to be cold, everybody knows that, but Spain?! Somehow I don’t think my dreams of going home for Christmas with a tan will come true.
5. It does it properly. The only upside to winter in England is the possibility of snow, which I still find exciting at 20 years old. However, even though it is getting colder here, I don’t think it will ever get cold enough for snow, meaning I have to suffer through the temperature without the redeeming feature of snow.

Maybe I’ll change my mind when I go back home for Christmas and experience English winter – or maybe I’ll put on as many scarves, hoodies and socks as I can find, settle myself in front of a radiator and stare out of the window until I see snow!

Antics in Alicante

This post is about my recent trip to Alicante with a friend, a fun day which nevertheless tested our patience in various ways!

Because Cartagena is quite a small town, we have to first go to Murcia then get a second bus from there. We had a good 15 minutes to buy our tickets in Murcia, but after the queue didn’t seem to be moving we decided to risk the ticket machines (we were reluctant as we hadn’t used them before, so didn’t want to end up doing something wrong) and then had to do a graceful run to the bus. We made it though!

For various reasons we had chosen the buses that would get us to Alicante at 2pm, which seemed a little late but there were only a few things we wanted to do, and the bus back was at 7pm, so we were sure we’d fit everything in.

We were lucky to have blue skies all day!

We walked along the port then decided the first thing we should do was quickly eat lunch. Despite many streets full of restaurants (mostly Italian and tapas), it took us a long time to find somewhere that we actually liked the look of. At 3pm we finally settled for one of the Italian ones, which took 15 minutes to take our order then told us it would take 15 minutes for them to make the pasta. This was slightly longer than we wanted but we agreed!

Within the next hour, two tables who has ordered after us got their food and we still hadn’t, so I eventually asked the waiter. He asked the chef, who said 5 minutes, and amazingly it actually was only 5 minutes. The waiter seemed very apologetic, and brought us a free pudding and coffee each, but by this point it was nearly 5pm and we were rapidly running out of time to see everything!

The castle is bigger than it looks in this picture…

We practically ran to the hill where Santa Barbara Castle stands, then slowed down considerably as we ascended the hill (and realised how unfit we were!). The walk was worth it though – the views, with the mountains in the background and building in the foreground, were amazing, and reminded us of somewhere more exotic than Spain! We even managed to catch the sunset on the way down; a slight advantage to the slow service at the restaurant!

My attempt at an interesting photo

The photo doesn’t quite do it justice, but it was an incredible sunset!

The walk back down!

Amazing views from the top

Once we had descended and caught our breath we rushed around and managed to squeeze in seeing two churches, the town hall and the harbour by night, with loads of street sellers and bright lights.

The town hall

Attractions at the harbour

We got the bus back to Murcia at 7pm then had to wait there for 50 minutes until the bus back to Cartagena.

I arrived back at 10pm ish, and ending up making conversation with a Spanish woman who was walking the same way as me. I felt pleased with myself that I had voluntarily had a conversation with a stranger – something else to cross off my ‘Spain bucket list‘!

Whilst Alicante is perhaps not the most interesting city in Spain (we were told by some people that there wasn’t much to do there), I would say it is definitely worth a visit if you are close to it, and climbing to the castle is a must! My only advice would be to arrive earlier, so it doesn’t matter if you do spend far too long eating lunch!

Walking past the boats

Pink skies

Spanish Cinema

Even though I might like to pretend the opposite, this post isn’t about some award-winning and thought-provoking Spanish film. My first experience venturing to see a Spanish-language film was, in fact, Hotel Transylvania 2, but it was actually very funny and I dare say I liked it more than I would have liked anything more sophisticated!

I highly recommend!

I hadn’t actually planned to go to the cinema, but one day last week when I arrived home from school the little boy in the family I am staying with said to me “Lizzie, we’re going to the cinema later if you want to come!” I am trying to get into the habit of saying ‘yes’ to any opportunity, so I of course agreed to this too. A few hours later he came to my room and told me we were going, so I went to the living room with my bag ad jacket where everyone else was getting ready.
It turns out the family hadn’t actually planned for me to go to the cinema, either.
After some confused discussions on where I was going it turned out that the mum wasn’t aware her son had invited me! It turned out okay in the end, and even though they had pre-booked tickets I managed to buy one that was next to them so didn’t have to sit on my own!

Aside from that, I was also a little worried that I wouldn’t understand a lot of the film, but to my pleasant surprise most of it was fairly easy to follow. I even laughed at some of the jokes! So I did learn something useful from the experience – if I want to watch foreign films, they should be cartoons!

Hopefully my next trip to cinema won’t be quite so confusing and, who knows, maybe I’ll even have progressed from children’s films…

Time to teach!

I’ve now been working at the school for a few weeks and slowly getting to grips with my role as a language assistant. I’m now a lot more comfortable standing up in front of a class to deliver a lesson but there has been a lot of learning along the way, including some improvisation and unexpected questions! Here are my experiences so far:

Lesson content

My new best friend

The first lessons I did were an introductory presentation about myself then one about Halloween in England. After that I expected that I would be sitting in on normal lessons, and perhaps helping out small groups, and occasionally preparing specific lessons, for example for Christmas. However I am now under the impression that every time I have a class it is basically up to me what I do! This week I’ve done a few on Bonfire Night and have started to think of some possible future ideas.
Even stranger is that the teachers are happy for me to use the same presentations for every class, despite them ranging in age from 11 to 16. So far, though, this has seemed to work fine and there haven’t been any problems!

Teacher involvement

There is a huge difference amongst the teachers in how much they get involved in the lesson.
Some sit at the back and pretty much leave me to it for the hour, which is fine, except when I run out of ideas! The first time I did my Bonfire Night presentation I finished it much quicker than I expected so had 20 minutes at the end of ‘winging it’ by asking questions in desperation that were only very vaguely relevant to the topic. I have since added more slides!
Some teachers help me out by encouraging the children to talk, and making sure everyone is participating and understands.
Some join in a lot more, asking and answering questions as well as the students and adding their own thoughts and opinions throughout the presentation.
However, every single one of the teachers is really lovely and helpful and they all seem happy with what I’ve been doing so far. I feel very lucky to have been placed in such a great school!

Student participation 

If only they were all this keen

It is amazing how big the difference is between age groups in terms of how much the students join in in the lessons! The youngest group I have is primero ESO, which is the equivalent of year 7. They are all really keen to talk and never stop asking questions, from “are there cheerleaders in schools in England?” to “why does everybody in England eat bacon and eggs for breakfast?” It took me 2 lessons to get through my very basic “About Me” presentation just because they talked so much!
On the the other hand, the year 9 and 10 equivalents hardly talk at all, and whenever I ask them a question I am met by a sea of blank faces until one person eventually puts me out of my misery and raises their hand. In that class I managed to finish my “About Me” presentation and the Halloween one within the hour! It’s pretty frustrating to have spent so long thinking of interesting speaking activities or questions to have them seem completely uninterested, but I’m hoping they’ll get more into it soon and start participating!

Technical problems

Thankfully nothing too disastrous has happened to me yet. I managed to get a virus on my memory stick from the school computers, but I realised before using it in my own laptop again so have given up on that and swapped to Google Drive! I’ve had some issues with sound in some classrooms, a certain video not working and the full-screen option not working. This was very annoying for my carefully planned slide animations which revealed definitions of words when I clicked so the students had a chance to guess first! Instead everything was already on the screen, but it was one of the quiet classes so I doubt they would have guessed much anyway….

On the whole I am really enjoying my job, and am looking forward to thinking of some lesson ideas that are slightly more creative than a PowerPoint presentation! I am glad I chose to be a language assistant, and very pleased that I was placed here. Now all I need is for the older kids to get more involved!