Going Private

After telling you all about them in the previous post, I'm going to quit one of my jobs today. After thinking about it a bit I realised what I probably should have a while ago: that €7 an hour is not worth losing my evenings for. I've already met people through that job and I'm not going to lose touch with them if I quit and after being reassured about the availability of private classes I'm going to pursue that option instead. It sounds more interesting as well, I don't like working for companies, particularly ones, frankly, as unprofessional as that language school is (not paying people on time, having enough teachers, having workable speaking rooms). It's provided me with a bit of steady income when I needed it but I much prefer being self-employed, so I'm going to put an ad up today on a couple of sites offering my services for private classes and see what response I get. tusclassesparticulares.com and loquo seem good places to start from what I've heard.

I finally tracked down the power lead for my camera, so I've updated a couple of previous posts with pictures. I had a nice wander on Saturday (on which I didn't take the camera) that took in peacocks in the Royal Gardens (round the corner from my house) and the park just north of Plaza de Espana with a great view over Casa de Campo and an ancient Egyptian temple that was donated by Egypt after Spain helped them restore some temples (or something like that...). It looks pretty strange, sat there in the middle of Spain, but its worth a look. You can go inside too but it was closed.

The Palace, Cathedral and Basilica de San Francisco (my house is just down the hill from the latter)

I also had a crack at vegan tortilla to add to my Spanish vegan repetoire at the weekend. It's made with chickpea flour and has a very different texture to the egg version but is still tasty and actually considerably easier to cook, although we still don't have a pan with a handle so I was still flipping it with a tea towel and immense difficulty.

We've been having other difficulties in our apartment with the electricity. We can't have more than one appliance with an element on at once or the fuse goes, and sometimes just the washing machine on its own is enough. This caused a fair amount of chaos at the weekend when my flatmate had 3 girls staying, all of whom had brought a hairdryer! I've been told that this is the same in all apartments in Madrid, to stop energy surges or something but I think ours must be espeically bad. Either way, there is some serious re-wiring now going on in the building which has led to this piece of installation art appearing outside our front door. I quite like it!

Word of the day: Particulares - Private Classes