The Roof Terrace, The Market and The Squat

I'm feeling much more like I actually live in Madrid now. I've settled into the apartment, bought some essentials (a stereo was first on my list), and started my job proper which has gone pretty well. I'm basically teaching the whole of a small financial services company out in a little very well kept suburb in north east Madrid. Its very like the training, but much less intense, with 4 hours of classes Tuesday to Thursday afternoons. I think they all think I'm a bit crazy (my teaching style is very animated) but they seem to be enjoying it. I find myself being absolutely terrified before I start an afternoons lessons, then when they start I go into teacher mode and it goes by in a flash and I walk out thinking that it was a breeze, only to be terrified all over again the next day!

We also realised that we've got access to our appartment building's roof terrace, from which you can see the Palacio Real, the Cathedral, the mountains and the Basillica de San Francisco which is just up a set of stairs behind our building where the local tramps go to sleep unhassled. The terrace is probably the best thing about the apartment, its a great place to have a beer and watch the sunset after work! We had a few people round last night for a mini flat warming, including two friends from Manchester who are hitching down to Lisbon to get jobs on a boat headed for South America.

The Palacio Real and Cathedral from our roof

Mountains in the distance

We all headed out today to see the famous and spralling El Rastro market, led by Melissa who's been in Madrid for a couple of years and knows her way around. First stop was for 'tostas', open sandwiches with various toppings - including a Madrid speciality only for the brave: baby eels - and a hangover fighting sangria from a bustling little place that serves nothing else. Then off into the market, which fills the streets and stretches almost halfway across old Madrid, selling everything from antiques to clothes to pornographic pocket watches. It's absolutely crammed full of people and you have to just flow along taking it all in. We stopped off in near Calle Mayor for chocolate con churros, another Madrid speciality which I still hadn't tried, fried pastry tubes dunked in hot chocolate so thick you feel you might be in danger of suffocation.

Inside the cigarette factory

After a quick stop off at 100 Montaditos, we went down to Lavapies to a massive old cigarette factory which has been squatted and taken over as a kind of huge social centre with a free shop, a bar, gardens growing veg and free classes in everything from Peruvian dancing to Russian (as well as one mysteriously listed as 'Gimp/Blender'). I have no idea how they've managed to make it work but it looks absolutely incredible! A great atmosphere, with people playing music together in the bar and generally hanging out. I want to start doing Spanish classes their and might offer to put on some English classes given my new skill set. I certainly want to find out how it works, I know people who have been trying to start a social centre in Manchester but have hit a bit of a brick wall, but if they came and saw this I guarantee they'd be right back on it. Anyway, I'll write more about this as and when I find out more.

I nearly forgot, I was on the radio on Friday along with my fellow training graduates. The company has radio and TV channels broadcasting to the whole of Spain and we got to be the guests on a show hosted by the guy in the videos they sent us before our interviews, a bit of a celebrity to us (sad, I know). So we chatted away for an hour, and only when it finished did he tell us it had about 400,000 listeners! Seems like a good way to get some experience doing that kind of thing though, and I think I might pitch a show if I can come up with a decent idea.

I don't like rolling all this into one big post so I'm going to try and write something here everyday or at least other day from now on, seeing as I'm only working 12 hours a week for now. Too much happens everyday to cover a whole week in a post!

A Scam and an Apartment

Unexpectedly, we have an apartment!

We went to look at a place with Luke's (new flatmate) girlfriend's mum who works in the Senate and she managed to convince the landlord to let us move in today, so we went for it, despite it being a bit of a grandma flat. Old mahogany panelled cabinet thing all down one wall, chandellier things on the ceiling and all of it. I reckon we can make it wicked though, I've got a couple of ideas to supe it up a treat. Its just south of La Latina, near Puerta del Toledo, the old city gate to Toledo, just outside old Madrid. We'd been manically looking for a place since Friday but most of the places we looked at wanted 3 months up front - 1st months rent, 1 month as deposit and 1 month in agency fees - and we just couldn't afford it. Then we found what seemed like too good a deal to be true on the internet, 300 Euros a month, great looking flat, being rented by a guy who had to move to London urgently and wanted to get the money quick. And then he started talking about transferring money through Western Union... hmmm. Soon enough we found another 300 Euro a month flat from a guy who had to move to London urgently and needed the money quick... yeah, massive scam. But when your desperate for a flat in a country where you don't know the score, I can see how a lot of people must fall for it, so potential ex-pats beware!

In the end though, we've decided to get this place, for 700 a month between 3, for a month or two while we find somewhere better. I start work tomorrow, and the thought of getting up in that hostel again was just not really an option! Its not bad though, and only a couple of minutes walk from La Latina which I look forward to exploring more thoroughly. We only had to pay 2 months up front as well, apparently pretty much all the flats advertised on the internet are through agencies that charge fees but ones with the day-glo orange 'aquilar' signs that you see in the street everywhere are just private lets so no fees.

I've had to run around getting my NIE number today so I can work, and I've got more to do tomorrow, going to the Hacienda (the equivalent of a City Council Centre Point, not a Manchester nightclub) to properly register as self-employed. If you didn't have a company sorting it out for you, I don't know how you'd get one, apparently it takes months. After that, I'm off to this company to teach some execs. Had two weeks practicing and got my lessons planned and so on so should be alright but I'm still a bit nervous.

I had a surprising moment in one of my practice classes which I forgot to mention actually. Doing a simple question and answer exercise, one student mentioned the new Health Minister. Before I knew it, I was facilitating a discussion (in English, advanced class) about the politics of the Spanish Health Department! Now, I follow British politics pretty closely, but I don't think I could even tell you who our Health Minister is, let alone get worked up about them! Subsequent conversations have confirmed that most people in Spain are incredibly clued up about politics and keep a very close eye on (apparently all of) their politicians. Since then we got told very clearly, in class: no politics, no football and no relationships. Apparently there have been fights over each...

Employment (and The House of Tiny Sandwiches)

Right well, I've got some catching up to do!

Firstly, I'm through the training course and starting teaching at a company on Tuesday! Its probably been the most intense two weeks of work I've ever done, including dissertations and bar openings, and where you're constantly being assessed and fear the chop at every turn. Although, saying that, the last week has actually been pretty fun, with us cracking up almost histerically (lack of sleep will do this to you) at regular intervals. Hopefully its going to start paying off soon too, although we only get our first full pay check in December.

Gran Via on the way to training in the morning

So for the past two weeks my life has consisted of getting up at 7.30, creeping around the hostel (still in the 12-person shared dorm), leaving in the morning cold before the sun is over the buildings but with beautiful clear blue skies, getting the Metro up to near the Bernabeu stadium, having 4 hours training in the morning, frantically adjusting lesson plans to fit the training through lunch, teaching 4 hours of classes in the afternoons, maybe if I was lucky going for a beer and tiny sandwich (more on this later) after work after the sun has gone back down behind the buildings, cooking dinner, and then doing around another 4 hours homework before getting to bed somewhere between midnight and 1am. In fact, most days, I didn't see the sun at all, despite there not being a cloud in the sky, as the entrance to the office was shaded by the enormous buildings. So today I've spent a day basking in the sun, reading a book and recovering from last night in a muraled square at the top of La Latina where I'm writing this from now.

I think I could probably do the morning commute through the Metro to the offices from my hostel blindfolded by now, although its absolutely packed between 8.30 and 9.30. I've become quite a fan of the Madrid Metro. Its feels a lot cleaner than the London Underground and more logical than Paris' labyrinth of tunnels. For some reason I've also found it suits an Ipod soundtrack of soul or reggae perfectly...

Anyway, both those who made it through training and those that didn't (and are still here) went out to celebrate last night (one who didn't make it has already got another English teaching job – there seems to be enormous demand in Spain at the moment), starting at a branch of La Cerveceria 100 Montaditos, or as we have taken to roughly translating it The House of 100 Tiny Sandwiches, which has become a bit of a habit. Basically, it's 2 Euros for a pint(ish) of beer and a montadito, or tiny sandwich, which given our tight budgets obviously has its attractions. They've basically taken the concept of tapas and put it in a breadroll, clearly a sound business plan as they've got branches all over Madrid and they're always packed in the early evening. The rest of the details of the night are a little hazy but included, a very small cocktail bar near Sol, a pretty cheesy club near Callao, and a very cool and cellar club with a really impressive lighting set up in the more respectable end Chueca, all with a bit of bottelon, or street drinking, in between.

The search for an apartment is now properly on. We looked round one yesterday in a great location but it was 1100 Euros a month (between 3) and they wanted 3 months up front which we just can't afford. One things for sure, if your looking to move to a new city, particularly if your not starting a job straight away, you need to have a good lump of cash available to cover all the set up and living costs. I opened a new bank account with Santander before I came, naively thinking that, as a Spanish bank it'd work as a Spanish bank account, which it doesn't, but they did give me an extra overdraft to play with which is (hopefully) going to see me through til the first paycheck. Luckily, one of the guys I'm looking for a flat with speaks pretty good Spanish, otherwise things would be a whole lot harder, although some of the estate agents do seem to have English speaking staff to show you round.

A good spot to write a blog from

I should be posting on this more regularly now I've got a bit more time, and I'll be sorting out the pictures tomorrow!

Slack

I've gone a bit quiet on this, simply because my training course is keeping me so busy (and I was so hungover on Saturday). I'm still on it though, which is good, although we've lost 3 of our number so far...

Seen a flat that we quite fancy near Alonso Martinez, looking round it this week, living out of a hostel can only be done for so long!

Normal service will be resumed when I don't have hours of homework every night.

Happy All Saints Day

So it turns out my second day of my intensive training course is in fact a public holiday, although no one seems quite sure what its for but its known, rather vaguely, as All Saints Day. Apparently there are absolutely loads of public holidays in Spain – I looked at a calendar, they're often more than once a month! From what I've seen, this seems to reflect the Spanish work ethic in general. Shops close at night (no 24 Tescos around) and most things apart from cafe and restaurants close on Sunday, even though there's still loads of people who would use them. There always seem to be more staff than is really necessary as well. It's an attitude much less orientated to making money than in the UK where your expected to work long and unsocialble hours in a lot of jobs. I, for one, love it, its more a work to live than live to work and probably leads to a much better quality of life.

The first day of the training was actually easier than I had expected. I thought we were being thrown straight into classes that afternoon, but we only had a morning session teaching us the method and style they use. So today I'm doing the homework (which is pretty long) and preparing for lessons tomorrow afternoon. They don't tell you what level the student your going to be teaching is so you've got to judge and adapt as you go along. It sounds quite exciting to me really! It turns out at 24 I'm the grandad of the group of trainees, most of them are 22 or 23, mostly in the same position as me although a couple have taught before. With it being a holiday today, we had the opportunity to go out last night and get to know each other a bit which was great and they seem like a good bunch. I think the less said about last night the better to be honest but we somehow decided to go out in Chueca, the gay district, which makes Canal Street look like an Essex stag do, and ended up seeing a little more of it than expected. About 8 inches more I'd say.

The entrance to Reina Sofia isn't quite Tate Modern but its pretty cool

For some slightly more cultural entertainment, I'd gone to the Reina Sofia museum on Saturday (its free after 2pm), which is the more modern of the main art museums in Madrid, with Picasso's Guernica being the main attraction. They also have a load of his preliminary sketches for it, intresting to see it developing. There's lots of old Spanish Civil War propaganda posters and photos too. My knowledge of the civil war pretty much goes as far as reading Homage To Catalonia by George Orwell so I'm curious to find out more after seeing those. It's easy to forget that Spain was a dictatorship until as recently as 1978. The thing I was most interested in seeing there, however, was their collection of Miro paintings, some of which my parents had around the house when I was little and apparently would hold me in front of to stop me crying. Disappointingly though, there were fewer than the guide book had made it sound, and they felt like a bit of a sideshow to Guernica which people were crowding into the next room to see. There is, however, a huge Miro on the building opposite my training offices which is pretty cool.

On with 'lesson planning' for tomorrow, I think they just throw you in at the deep end and see how you do to start with so its not too nerve racking but I'd rather not sound like a complete idiot!

Iberian Jobseeking

The hostel owner appears to have gone away for a couple of days, which is probably just as well as he'd have been distraught yesterday – it absolutely tipped it down! Rivers of water running down the streets. Apparently it only rains that hard once a year, and everyone looked very shell-shocked by the whole thing, particularly not being able to sit on the street at cafes. Jorge's disappearance also means that there's another guy on the hostel desk, with a very relaxed attitude to staying up drinking loudly in the kitchen til 5am...

Heavy rain in Sol

Anyway, the main thrust of this post is supposed to be about how I went about getting a job before I set off, for anyone wanting to do the same thing in Spain or probably most of Europe. The thing is, I can't exactly remember how I got it! I put a lot of time into first researching generally getting a job in Spain and then – having the obvious essential thing in most jobs would be speaking Spanish – searching 'English speaking jobs in Spain/Barcelona/Madrid' as well as bombarding every English or Irish bar I could find the email address for, regaling them with tales of my hardwork and enthusiasm for pulling pints and how I was 'ready to jump on a train tomorrow'. The latter turned out to be a bit of a dead end. I only got one reply from what must've been about 30 emails and when they realised I wasn't already in Barcelona, they said sorry but we need someone right away. In hindsight, it wouldn't have been as easy as just turning up – you need a NIE number before you can work in Spain and in big cities that takes about 2 weeks (you need an address in Spain as well so it would be difficult to get before you set off).

Searching for English speaking jobs inevitably involved wading through a lot of guff on Google but there were some good leads in it. Unfortunately this is where my bad memory comes into play - I also searched Gumtree and some other jobs sites and can't remember exactly where or how I found the Vaughan Systems teaching job but it was definitely the best one I'd found and I didn't hestitate to send off my CV (slightly altered from the bar version) and give it a go. I then had to go to London for an interview, feeling a bit stupid in my suit, which was fairly straight forward. It seems they're really just looking for enthusiastic and talkative people with decent English. The drawback, however, is that I haven't definitely got the job yet – the two week training is an ongoing assessment and only an average of 50% make it through, so I am out here on quite a limb as well as having invested a fair bit of cash into getting to London for the interview, buying some 'business casual' attire and time into learning all this grammar, and if I don't get through that'll all largely be in vain.

On my searches I'd also seen a lot of au pair jobs, but they were all looking for women so I stopped looking at them after a while, but just before I left, a friend sent me a link to an agency looking for both men and women (MCS) and they got back to me straight away, offering a family to go and stay with while being an 'English older brother' to their three sons. It sounded quite fun really, and I was sad to turn it down but it only paid 80 Euro's a week living allowance and they lived a little bit out from the centre. Still, I told the agency about my situation and said I'd get back to them if this falls through so at least I have a plan B. I actually met an American girl yesterday working as an au pair and she said it was quite good but at the same time there wasn't much opportunity to meet people or have your own space.

It can be quite a lonely experience, moving to a new city where you don't know anyone and especially where you don't speak the language but I've realised over the past couple of days the only way around this is just to launch yourself into it. Anyone speaking English, holding a dictionary or a guidebook is now your friend, and you can't be shy with what little Spanish you have – you just have to go for it and look like a bit of a fool talking in English if necessary, expressions and gestures can pretty much get most things across. I got chatting to a group of locals in a bar the other night and, although the guy I spent most of the time talking to didn't speak any English, I definitely understood that he was trying to get me to sleep with his sister-in-law!

Anyway, today's the end of my wow-isn't-Madrid-so-cool four day holiday and now its onto the actual everyday of living and working here. I'll let you know how it goes.

Wow.

Wow, wow, wow. I've been wandering round various places for the past couple of days, each one better than the last! Just when you think you've seen the main bits or are getting the feel for the place, you go to another neighbourhood and its completely different. The main bit of the city isn't very big, and large parts of it are pedestrianised (or the cars have simply given up) so you can stroll, largely uninterupted, across it in about 20 minutes. I don't have time to go into all of the places I've explored now so I'll save neat and beautiful Huertas, the winding streets of La Latina, the grand Palace Real, its guards with very odd hats and listening to the saxophone drift over the lake with the lions in La Retiro for later. 

Relaxing at Retiro

I think I've fallen in love with Malasaña, the bohemian mishmash of streets around the Plaza Dos De Mayo, north of Gran Via. The narrow streets are full of bars, cafes, clothes shops, history, grafitti and, wierdly, small dogs - old people with small dogs, young people with small dogs, punks with small dogs, small dogs on their own... they're bloody everywhere! But I digress. Malasaña, named after a seamstress executed by the French after being found with a pair of scissors during an uprising, is definitely somewhere I'd want to live. The bars are full, the streets are busy, the atmosphere's great and the people are a diverse bunch. This is going to sound very sad but I spent last night doing a sort of grammar bar crawl around there, nipping from bar to bar, whipping out my grammar books in each one and soaking up the atmosphere. It's great to <parents look away now> be able to smoke in bars again! Pretty much everyone seems to smoke, adding to the bohemian atmosphere of Malasaña in particular, and Madrid in general. There's a real street culture here, with bars and restaurants busy at all times of the day. Madrid seems to some extent to have resisted some of the uniformity of globalisation as well. There's the odd Starbucks and McDonalds here and there but far, far more independent little coffee shops, tapas bars and eateries.

A healthy sense of humour in evidence in Malasaña

I'm still getting used to the pace of life here – I've noticed that there's a distinct Madrid gait that makes people appear to be walking at normal speed when they are actually walking very slowly. As someone who walks quite quickly, this has led to me either nearly walking into people or walking in slow motion behind them looking a bit foolish! Also, although its officially on Central European Time, Madrid actually operates at about GMT+4. Everything is later: opening times, lunch, dinner, drinks, clubs, closing.

I got myself a Spanish phone yesterday - quite a linguistic test for me and the man in the Orange shop. I'd managed to muster “Yo tengo un telephone Ingles, pero yo quiero usar en España”, from my pocket dictionary, which turned out to be a completely useless phrase once we'd figured out the phone was sim-blocked. Anyway, we bundled through with the help of a translation website and I learnt a bit of Spanish along the way. I can just about manage “Una cervesa, por favor” without eliciting a “Huh?” from the barman now. I met up with some fellow Ingles earlier, on a trip to the notary to get my NIE number (national insurance number) who are doing the same training I'm starting on Monday and was relieved to find none of them spoke Spanish either! I'm a bit worried that I might just end up speaking English the whole time if I'm not careful though so I'm going to set myself the challenge right here, right now, of writing the last entry of this blog before I leave entirely in Spanish. (A double-edged challenge – I have to keep writing this til I leave as well).

Having spent two days here, it feels like such a fantastically different, lively and vibrant place I've pretty much decided that I'm going to stay here for the best part of a year whether I get this job or not!

Arriving

After writing the last post (written in a hurry from Manchester by the way, hence how I could have not yet left but also forgotten underwear), I calculated that, based on previous form, I manage to catch pre-booked transportation about 70% of the time, and that given that there were in total four changes to make (including getting up at 5am in London) I had very little chance of actually making it all the way to Madrid without some problem. But surprisingly, it did all go to plan.

A word about Eurolines buses: They will leave from the place they say, at the time they say, but past that, while travelling on them everything else seems completely incomprehensible. What is the driver saying? How long are we staying here for? Why have we taken a diversion through this tiny French village? What on earth was that woman thinking when she brought her newborn baby on a 15 hour coach journey? Well, I'm having a moan now, but to be honest I did quite enjoy it, even despite having to sit through a dubbed version of The Transporter 3 in very loud Spanish (it didn't really detract from the plot that much, especially once you've grasped the meaning of the word 'mierda' which makes up a good part of the script, along with <Statham punches man/woman/wall/car/himself>). I've always liked long journeys, I think it comes from my mum taking me on 15 hour plane journeys from when I was a newborn baby...

So I'm in Madrid, on the date I planned to be here a couple of weeks ago, feeling probably the most organized I've ever been. After a bit of a hectic journey through the metro system with my heavy bag and suitcase (there's a lot of stairs) and finding the hostel on Plaza Santa Domingo, I spent the early evening having a wander round Sol and La Latina and sitting in the sunshine in the big, open Plaza Mayor that apparently used to host all kinds of 'public entertainment', from bullfights to executions. The main entertainment for me tonight, however, was watching 'fat Spiderman' ply his trade. This essentially involves a rather portly man walking around the square in a cheap Spiderman outfit, comically inducing people to get their photo's taken with him for a small fee. He looked something like Dom Joly gone freelance, particularly when he rolled his mask up to his nose and sat down for a fag break next to some bemused teenagers. He was absolutely raking it in though. I estimated that while I was watching him, he must have been making upwards of 30 Euros an hour. Well, if this job falls through, there's always options I suppose.

Fat Spiderman doing his thing in Plaza Mayor

Anyway, my first impression is very much of a modern, living city where things are happening in every available space – every tiny alcove seems to have a taverna nestling in it - unlike, say, Paris where, although lovely, it can sometimes feel a bit like a historical relic where the modern day, almost apologetically, happens to be going on around it. This feels like a well lived in city made up as much of its people as its buildings, although maybe this is because most of them aren't that impressive (the buildings, not people). I realised before I arrived that I couldn't think of one landmark in Madrid, but thats not really what the place seems to be about. But hey, I've only been here half a day so I reserve the right to go back on all of this later!

Language is proving a bit of a barrier but I can feel myself already picking up words from overhearing conversations and having to find out how to say things. However, I'm in the odd position of coming to Spain and sitting here with an English Grammar textbook – you need it for this English teaching job because they teach English here like we learn French or Spanish at school, based on grammatical structure. I'd never even given the grammatical structure of English a thought before now, probably because its absolutely ridiculous – every rule has exceptions, and there's irregular bits all over the place. It's really like we just made it up as we went along, but I suppose that's what happens when you mash several languages together and let it evolve over time.

I'm off to go explore some other areas today, which is <gasp> cloudy. The hostel owner looked very glum about this this morning and told me “When it rains, we cry.” Good job people don't have that attitude in Manchester...

Ready? Set? Sort of.

I only decided to move to Spain a couple of weeks ago, in Paris actually, cheesily enough watching the sunset from the steps of Sacre Cour. Why move to London when you can move anywhere? I want to learn Spanish and want to move somewhere different, definately somewhere warmer, but not too far away. So, after a slight detour to Bestival, I sat down and started doing some research into moving to Spain.

I was going to need a job, money being a bit tight, so I thought I'd start there. First problem: I don't speak Spanish. A few searches for 'English speaking jobs in Spain' later and things weren't looking good, unemployment is currently around 40% in Spain and the essential thing most websites advised was being able to speak the language.

Undeterred, I set about finding email addresses for every English and Irish bar in Madrid and Barcelona (I hadn't made up my mind where exactly I was going at this point - wherever they would give me a job was my thinking). Eventually, after countless 'Enthusiastic UK barman seeks job' emails, I came across a couple of teaching jobs that didn't require any Spanish. I've never taught before but worth a try right? To cut a long story short, after an interview in London, I start training for Vaughan Systems in Madrid next Monday (more about this later).

Last minute travel plans ensued. Not wanting to fly (for environmental and luggage reasons), I tried to book a train which sounded amazing, like a hotel on rails: beds, a dining car, a bar, watching the sunrise over breakfast and all that. My advice: book it early! Last minute is near impossible, especially if your on a budget, so instead I'm getting on a Eurolines bus at 8am tomorrow morning for a gruelling 28 hour coach journey with no beds, no dining car, no bar, no sunrise and no breakfast.

Hostel booked for a couple of weeks during the training, I'm hoping to meet some people and find a flat before long. I've been thinking a good way to learn Spanish would be to move in with some non-English speaking Spaniards but on the other hand that might be a little too deep end. Anyway, I've got a couple of days to get orientated in this city I've never been to, before I start the (apparently very intense) training.

I have clothes, a passport, a laptop, a trumpet, and 2 pairs of boxers (I forgot the rest), wish me luck!