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...
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.
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