Tortilla II

So it seems the celebrations did go on late into the night in the city centre last night after Real won the Copa del Rey, even though Sergio Ramos managed to drop the cup under a bus! Sergio!

There was so much to write about yesterday I forgot about this. I cooked another tortilla the other night, and with the help of a non-stick pan (with a handle this time) and some advice from a half Spanish friend, it came out absolutely perfect. I think the main tips to take away are to put almost as much onion in as potato, which makes it nice and moist, and put it on a very low heat when putting the potato-egg mix back in the pan. A non-stick pan  does help considerably though too. Here it is, post flip.

Also, maybe it's that I'm looking a bit more tanned these days, but people keep asking me for directions recently. I've often been mistaken for a local in many European countries before, but not until recently in Spain, and my students laughed when I asked them if I looked Spanish in an exercise. Anyway, it's quite satisfying that I can actually direct them now too, as I'm currently doing the Rosetta Stone module on giving (and receiving) directions. Still a very long way to go with my Spanish though. Another reason to stay in Spain next year maybe.

Word of the day: Vela - Candle

Back in Spain, Back on Blog

I'm back in Madrid having had a nice 10-day break in the UK over Christmas and a break from writing anything here for a while. By the time I left just before Christmas, I was feeling pretty worn out. It felt the similar to how I remember feeling at the end of my first term at University  - its been great but now its cold, dark, no one understands you and you want to go home! (Although now its a language barrier thing rather than late-teen angst with the understanding). Having to deal with the court situation and juggling debts didn't particularly help either and I also ended up staying and working for 3 days after all my friends had left which really made it drag.

Anyway, having had a break at home, I now feel quite refreshed and have a renewed optimistic outlook about living here. I remembered on the way back the excitement I felt when I was first moving here, only now I have a job, some friends, an apartment, speak a bit of the the language and so on.

The language is actually starting to click into place a little now. I'm using Rosetta Stone as well as getting some Spanish classes through a job (although I've only had one so far). I'd done a bit of Rosetta Stone at home but its much more effective if you're immersed in the language every day. So for example, as soon as I learnt the word for clean (lympia), I noticed a sign in a shop for 'productos lympieza' (cleaning products) which just makes it stick. Also, you can't help picking up words day to day - you're not going to forget the word for anchovies once you've accidentally bought a can of olives stuffed with them, trust me. In fact by now, I can understand most signs in shops and on the street and get the gist of most conversations. Speaking is more difficult, I have to put a sentence together in my head before I can say it but practice is the best thing, and practice is made easier once your a little drunk, I've found...

Looking back over my time here so far, that doesn't seem bad for two and a half months spent speaking English all day! It feels like I only need a little more and then I can start speaking to people more and it will snowball a bit from there. I didn't study any Spanish while I was back in England, but it feels like my brain has been digesting what I learnt over the last couple of months which feels more solid now.

Now that I've got a bit of money coming in (the back-dated pay checks are finally kicking in), my next objective is buying a bike and, eventually, moving apartments I think. Racing bikes (bicicletas carretera) seem to be a bit less common and more expensive here (cheapest I could find on eBay was €100) but I need to do some more research and check out the Rastro I suppose.

Oh yeah, I had an awful trip back actually though. Having not flown from England in about 3 years I'd forgotten some of the aspects of international travel there. WARNING: if you move to Spain, don't get too used to how things work. They may be very relaxed about timekeeping, service, aeroplane boarding times and things like that here, but that does not mean they will be in England when you get back! Lesson learned.

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!