5 Things I'll miss about Christmas back home

Christmas time in Madrid

     The year is winding down. The other professors and I are finishing up our classes and planning trips back home or elsewhere in Europe for the holidays. Ticket's back are ridiculously expensive this time of year so heading back to Florida for a week isn't an option. Instead I'm flying to Ireland to spend it with family there. Although I'm so excited to be back in Belfast drinking Guinness with my cousins and speaking English for a whole week, there are somethings I'm going to miss about being home for Christmas.

     1. Christmas Eve at Dads. Drinking too much wine, opening presents while Andrew and Dad play guitar together (Paul and I making fun of them the whole time), eating dinner and telling the same stories we told last year, and the year before, but laughing just as hard. Hayley and I talking about books or travelling and trying to have a real conversation before Andrew strikes a goofy pose from across the room and I spit up my drink.

     2. Midnight Irish coffee with Mom. Taking a shot of Jameson and Baileys with my Mom at midnight in our coffee while everyone tries to figure you sleeping arrangements. In 25 years this is the first time I won't be sleeping on someone's apartment floor or squeezed onto a couch with my brothers and sister snoring next to me. My Mom always made sure we were together.

     3. Christmas Morning. Seeing my Grandmother, a little smaller than last year but funnier than ever. The most upbeat, happy, amazing, intelligent woman I've ever met. She beat cancer last year and every Christmas I get to spend with her from now on won't be taken for granted.

     4. My Dad. Just my Dad. Walking around in his boxers in a Hawaiian shirt playing Christmas carols on his mandolin with glasses hanging from his collar and his hair in a cowlick in the back.

     5. The best dinner of the year. Hands down my favorite meal of the year. A couple of years ago Hayley, Paul, Andrew and I started going to a restaurant for Christmas dinner. We buy a couple bottles of wine and talk for hours. I never laugh that hard with anyone. It's the kind of laughing where you can't breathe and your sides hurt and you have tears running down your face. When I leave and walk out into the cold I feel flushed and exhausted and happy. All it takes is that one dinner to make everything okay. I'm 5 again and I'm with people that love me unconditionally and everything is a big ball of significance and meaning. For those couple hours we beat back the world and nothing can touch us.



     I miss my friends and family but I'm excited for what Christmas and the new year will bring. Merry Christmas to my new family in Spain, my family in Chicago, Northern Ireland, and Florida, have a great one guys.

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.

The night Spain ruined pizza

     Moving abroad has its share of challenges. In Spain, for example,  most apartments don't come with dryers or air conditioning. Totally cool, I'm fine with that. Just don't use a comforter and leave your wash out for three days until its starting to sprout. I can deal. One thing that definitely doesn't suck about Spain is that the food is fantastic and super cheap. You can get a mini beer and a plate of paella for 2 euros down the street, and a weeks worth of groceries for 20. Not bad at all. But one thing I have been missing is pizza.
     I'm going on record now to say that pizza is the perfect food. It's portable, deliverable, can be folded, cut into squares, reheated, eaten cold. It's cheap and has a high calorie count,which makes it ideal for starving college kids. You've got the whole food pyramid hidden in its layers of cheese, tomato sauce, pepperoni, and crust. It's beautiful really.
     So last night I started going into withdrawals thinking of that greasy perfection that I had gone nearly a week and a half without. I decided to take a run at a frozen pizza from the mercado down the street. After spending exactly 18 minutes trying to understand the three strange flavors they had in the frozen food aisle I decided to go with Atun y Bacon. Being that bacon was the only ingredient I recognized, I snagged it and a bottle of vino and headed back.

     With two episodes of Breaking Bad on my laptop, my roommate out for the night and a pizza in the oven I was good to go. Soon my lust would be quenched and I would fall into that zone of greasy comfort that one experiences post pizza guzzling.
     Suddenly a smell began to waft its way into the living room. A pungent, thick smell. A fishy smell.
     I cautiously entered the kitchen and closed the window to the courtyard outside, thinking some awful paella related food disaster had drifted in. But the smell grew stronger. I sniffed the trash, the sink, the fridge.
    Then I opened the door of the oven and out came the horrific burnt fish smell. I turned off the heat and rushed to my computer to find out exactly what the hell was on my pizza.
    Atun. Tuna. I had bought a bacon, and tuna, pizza.
    I wanted to rush down to the market and demand my money back. I wanted to explain to them that there was a reason most photos of pizza show the simple but elegant relationship of pepperoni and cheese. You don't mess with a classic. But they were closed and my stomach was growling menacingly.
     So when I got over the initial shock I tried it. I really did. I sliced a piece off and gingerly tested it...and it came right back up. This was no freshly caught tuna but dehydrated, grated tuna, with a sickly grayish color. I felt defeated. And hungry. Mostly still hungry. So I did the only thing I knew. I scraped off the cheese, bacon, and tuna, and doused the sad looking pile of dough and tomato sauce in front of me with balsamic vin to cover up the smell.
    When this farce of what was supposed to be a gluttonous feast was over I donned a hazmat suit and deposited the tortured remains of my meal into the trash outside.
   
    I rinsed my mouth out with a heady dose of red wine and lay down to a comfortless sleep. It was  the night Spain ruined pizza.

The Schengen Visa

After rereading that last post I realized how discouraging it must be to people who are thinking about moving abroad. In an effort to make up for that I want to talk about one of the biggest hurdles you come up against when trying to join a language assistant program, the Schengen visa.

 

 



Much to my dismay, after the paperwork submitted for my initial interview with BEDA and the worrying about plane fares and selling off all worldly possessions before moving abroad, there's still one last (huge) step. Put simply the long-term student visa needed to stay in Spain longer than 6 months is a confusing purgatory littered with the bodies of those who simply give up and break under the strain of the process. The thing that makes it difficult is that NO ONE seems to know exactly which documents are needed or which sites to visit to get reliable information. There are only a few consulates in the U.S. and the majority of them require you to submit your documents in person. So, to give you an idea of how much a pain in the ass this is, if you live in say, South Carolina, you have to take all of your documents and physically bring them to the consulate in charge of your district. In Miami.

                                                                                 

 

The good news is, everyone who has been involved with these programs before you had to do this and are more than willing to help with any questions. I had planned originally on going in-depth into what exactly the requirements are and how to go about getting them done. But, the thing about writing is that someone before you has probably said it, and said it better. If you live in Florida, Georgia, or South Carolina take a look at Nicole's blog post about what the reqs. are and a great breakdown of what they cost. http://theperksofbeingawanderer.blogspot.com/2013/05/passport-to-paris-or-madrid.html

 

To set the actual visa appointment I used a third-party website. They charge a fee but it's only about six bucks and that was worth it for me not to have to sit on the phone for an hour listening to a Spanish rendition of My Heart Will Go On. http://www.vfsglobal.com/Spain/usa/Miami/

 

Right now I'm still in the process of getting everything together. My appointment is later on this month and I'll make sure to keep everyone posted on any issues that come up.





In the thick of it

     One of the biggest problems with this whole move is the paperwork. No one seems to know where this letter gets sent or what kind of background check you need, what number you call to get a human being on the line to talk about student loan deferment. It's easy to get discouraged. Lately I've been finding it harder and harder to picture myself in Spain. It was enough before, seeing myself hiking or drinking a beer in a café or travelling on a train. Now that all seems to be buried under mountains of forms. You start to realize, oh yah, this is why not many people uproot their lives to move to another country. It's not really the physical distance, or the money. Just the increasingly difficult acrobatics you have to perform to jump through their hoops. Time seems to move at two speeds: achingly slow or way too fast. When I think about the next three weeks without a day off, working at a desk all day then changing into my servers outfit, I just want it to fly by. Then I start checking off the days until my flight. With my bank account in the double digits and the list of things I still need to do, people I need to see, phone calls that need to be made...I want to sleep for a week.
    I'm in the thick of it now. But it will be over soon. A decision like this, an adventure like this, never happens when you've gotten plenty of sleep, are well rested and prepared. It kicks down your door when you've got one leg trapped in your jeans and your arms outstretched ready to fall.
    In three months I will be flying over the blue Atlantic, watching the sun rise over the Iberian peninsula, thousands of miles away from anyone that knows my name.