Teaching

 

      Sometime around noon today I looked down to find myself in an apron with a giant tortoise printed on the front in bright pastel colors. His name is Tex. Because I'm wearing the apron, I am now Tex. I want to tell the three year-old student sucking back snot who is holding on to my leg that although my appearance has been cunningly disguised as an amphibian I am still his teacher before bubbles of mucus soak into my pant-leg. While trying to disengage him however, I am still trying to get three students to understand what I mean when I say 'please get that out of your mouth, it's not safe and you'll be electrocuted' and calm down a hysterical young Chinese girl. I look up at the teacher I'm supposed to be assisting and her head is in her hands.

     

Luz Casanova-The front of my school in Carabanchel

 

 My teaching day usually starts off so full of promise. I wake up and take a quick shower, throw on some clothes and pop my I-pod on and run out the door. I grab a coffee at the metro stop closest to my school. The air is cool, I have a hot drink in my hand and I'm awake and ready for the day.

      My first few classes are primeria or elementary school aged kids. These are my best behaved students of the day. They can be bribed with anything. Telling them I'll draw an American flag on their work if they finish is enough to get them in a frenzy. They ask questions, they are quiet when I ask them to be, and they are generally respectful and nice to be around. About 10 I get one of the older students to grab me another coffee and I chug this while writing in the staff room.

      My next group is harder. The seconderia students are not interested in where I'm from or how I can help them. I'm just the guy standing in the way of the chalk board speaking too fast in a foreign language. I try to get through the next hour without causing anyone bodily harm.

      By noon I'm out of steam and it's time for the big leagues.The infantil or preschool group is like if you took a group of the criminally insane, made them bite-size, then got them drunk. As I walk into the classroom I'm confronted by a litany of offensive sights and sounds. I rank them in my head to organize which to deal with first:

 

 

-There are two boys holding another, extorting payments in the form of jigsaw-puzzle pieces.

 

-A thin girl has her hand shoved up her nose to the wrist, searching for something that is probably better off lost.

 

-The boy in the corner being quiet and pensive as he stares at the wall just shat his pants.

 

-A crazed three year old has just taken ahold of a plastic cup and is wielding it as a weapon against four cautious students who are looking for their opening in what appears to be the toddler version of a classic bar brawl.

 

       I quickly disarm the cup kid, send the two mafiosos back to their seats, and (with paper towels encasing my hands) remove the girls forearm from her nose. I avert my eyes from the boy in the corner and wait for the real teacher to arrive to deal with the rest.

 

       When I get home I'm exhausted, my clothes need to be fumigated and I feel frustrated. Not because I feel overworked or mad, but because I didn't expect to care this much about teaching. I catch myself getting really excited when that light clicks and a student understands a tense or can answer me in broken English. When I flop down on the couch at night and grab a beer I thank God for the thousandth time that I had teachers in my life that stuck it out and put up with my snot, disrespect and insanity so that I could be here now.

     

 

 

 

 

 

A typical day in Madrid

One of the reasons I wanted to move abroad was to live somewhere long enough for the place to sink in. I wanted to be changed. I wanted to adapt to the things around me. Vacations aren't really enough time to get the full effect of a place. I wanted to really live somewhere. I wanted to buy groceries and ride the metro, be annoyed and frustrated at times and become a local. I'm only a month in so I can't really say whether or not living here has made a permanent impact on me yet but I do know that I love it here.
The people have a lust for life you can taste. The culture is centered around living, not working. And although their economy is one of the worst in Europe at the moment, you could never tell by looking at them. My walk to the metro every morning takes me down a two-lane road separated by a wooded boulevard. I wake up early when the steam is still rising from the sidewalks as fruit and vegetable vendors hose off the walks in front of their shops. Open cafes line the street and offer café con leche, churros, zumo de naranja, and pan for breakfast. Students run to catch buses, parents lead their kids by the hand to their schools and the air is thick and fragrant like a birthday candle has just been blown out.
The metro is fast and efficient. It's clean and has color coded lines that make it easy to identify and remember. I usually only wait about five minutes for one to come rushing into the station.
My school is located in Carabanchel in the southern district of Madrid across the river. The neighborhood is working class but lively. I found a kebab place across from my school that sells thick lamb sandwiches in a white and brown sauce packed with lettuce. They bring it out to you steaming, cupped in a square of parchment paper. During lunch I usually grab a cana to go with it, a cheap half-pint sized cerveza. After my regular classes I head to some private ones located in different areas around Madrid. My last class is located twenty minutes form my apartment so I cut through Retiro park to get there.
Retiro park is a massive expanse of fountains, garden, glades, ponds, atriums, and cafes right down the street from me. I take any opportunity to pack a backpack with my laptop, some food, and a book and head there for a few hours.
After I cut through Retiro to my neighborhood I stop off at the mercado to grab dinner. A loaf of bread still warm from the oven, sliced jamon, olive oil, and a bottle of wine costs me three euros.
I go to sleep full, content, and tired.
You would think a month would be long enough for the honeymoon phase of living here to wear off but I still find more things I love about living here everyday.

Running with the bulls in Moralzarzal

The main street of Moral, you can see Cody, Jake, and I looking nervous there in the middle

I rubbed my hands together for warmth in the thin drizzle of rain and regretted not bringing a jacket. Multi-colored streamers flapped over the narrow street as young men smoked cigarettes nervously and laced up their shoes. The air smelled like coffee and beer from the cafes that were packed along the streets, their entrances now boarded up with thick wooden beams that stretched between iron fence posts. The posts are designed specifically for these fiestas and are there to keep shops, bars, and onlookers safe. People snapped photos and hunkered close together on top of the fences. Through the thickening rain I could see a white gate at the far end of the street. In the center was painted the rough outline of a bull. Suddenly, I heard a crash. The gate trembled for a second then settled. The bull run was about to begin.
Jake and Cody, my buddies from the BEDA program, and I had been invited to the pueblo of Moralzarzal by Greg, another professor who lived there and wanted to check out the town's week long fiesta and encierros, or bull runs. Sipping coffee on the forty-minute bus ride from Madrid, talking about running with the bulls seemed fun in an abstract, bucket-list kind of way. Cody and I joked about how close we would get to it and who would chicken out first. We had both grown up watching Real TV footage of the carnage at Pamplona every year when thousands of people descend on the city to drink and tempt fate with the torros. Shortly before leaving for Spain my Dad had sent me a youtube video compilation of the worst mano-y-torro clips to deliberately dissuade me from ever partaking.

Lacing up for the run

The good, or bad, part about this experience was that it was 9 o'clock in the morning when we arrived. The encierros were scheduled to begin in 30 minutes and Cody and I were stone cold sober. No liquid courage no warm us as we walked along the street and noticed dozens of police officers and paramedics in reflective yellow, standing behind the fences. We began talking strategy. What ifs. Maybe we should sit the first one out, you know, just see how it all goes down.
So we stood in the pouring rain. Trying not to shake from the rain and the low, ferocious bellowing emanating from beyond the white gate.
The way it works, two castrated bulls are herded through the streets from the bullring (plaza de torros) to the corral where the bulls are kept. Then the bull comes out of the gate and, ideally, follows the other bulls down the street and into the ring. The sound I heard next caused a ripple of excitement along the crowded street.
Bang!
The shot rang out and in the split second or so I had before I started running I realized with startling clarity that bulls are big.
Bulls are VERY big.
This one was pissed and running straight at me. In that moment I could see everything. The cords of muscle straining underneath it's slick hide. Its horns a foot and a half long and sharp. Rain slid off of them and onto the cobblestones as it shook its head, registering the street, the people, the confusing cacophony of sounds and sensations. Its eyes turned to slits, its haunches lifted and it pounced, hooves clacked loudly on the street, connected, then shot forward all in one motion like an arrow shot from a bow.
I was on that fence and scrambling to the top, pushing old folk and children out of the way, faster than you could say man-card revoked.
After the bull went past and I was able to pry my fingers off the wooden beams of my seat and avoid the looks of the elderly and children I had shamelessly manhandled moments before,  I determined to make the next one count. I was going to do this.
The next bull was even bigger than the first. And faster. It was a black blur as it flashed out of the gate and once more I found myself scampering up the sides of the fence and folding myself praying-mantis like inward to avoid getting snagged by a horn. I was lucky, but the guy standing five feet in front of me wasn't. When he tried at the last second to leap out of the way his feet went one way and his body another. His head ricocheted off the street and was immediately awash in bright red blood from a gash above his eye. The bull's left horn pierced his thigh to the bone then ripped it open in all in one motion before it was past us, down the street, then out of sight.
As the paramedics and police ran over and determined whether or not the man's femoral artery had been severed and the crowds continued to order beer and wait for the next bull, I thought to myself what a strange country I was living in.
The third bull was about to leave the gate. I tied my shoes tighter and got whatever a sensible distance is from an animal that has every reason to want to kill you.
When the shot rang out this time, I was ready. I took off. Bounding around tracksuits and Real Madrid jerseys, cutting close to walls and trying very hard not to look behind me. As the street grew narrower near to the plaza de torros the crowded fences began to point and raise there voices quickly to the action behind me. Somewhere behind me there was a mini-van with spikes hurtling towards me, gaining on me every second. I didn't look but pressed forward, underneath the arched gateway of the plaza and into the sand of the bullring then immediately to my right, running along the fence then vaulting myself over into what I hoped would be the arms of impressed onlookers but ended up being an unforgiving floor of cement. Milliseconds later the bull came flying into the stadium.
I wiped sand from a busted lip and heaved myself up to join the cheering crowd as the bull was marched away until the fight later on that night.
I promised myself that I would never do anything that stupid again. Then I ran three more times.