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

A Day In The Life

I had a relatively quiet weekend that included a failed trip to Alcazar de San Juan to see a friend of my girlfriend who turned out not to actually be there... I can tell you however, that they will exchange train tickets without charging you again, which would definately hit a wall of officiousness in the UK. Alcazar? I wouldn't bother.

I thought it might be useful, for anyone planning on moving to Spain to teach English, to hear what a typical weekday is like for me at the moment now that I've settled into some kind of routine. I suppose in some ways it hasn't lived up to the ideas I had and in other ways it's exceeded them.

Torre Picasso in the early morn

So, I usually wake up around 9am, apart from Tuesday when I have to be up at 6 to go teach at 8. This has been pretty horrible until recently as it's still been dark and freezing cold on leaving the house and I have to trek across town on the packed (and still starey) metro, to the heavily concreted area near the Bernabeu to teach for 2 hours in the imposing Torre Picasso. Most days though, I spend the morning messing around, catching up on emails, planning lessons or doing the various things that life demands and when it's warm enough, having breakfast on the roof. Then from Mon-Thu, at 11.30 I have to set off for Aravaca where I teach 4 hours of classes at a friendly little company in the 'suburbs' (theres a little stretch of countryside between them and the main city). I go via the underground Moncloa bus interchange with another massive city gate sitting on top of it, often stopping off to photocopy some pages at the shop there where the two women are perenially amused at my foreigness.

The gate at Moncloa

These are classes that I get through the 'agency' company I work for, for which I have to prepare a lesson plan and lead the class in quite an intense way. On the bus there and back there are snatched views of the Sierra and the 4 huge towers that I keep meaning to go have a look at in the north of the city. After I finish I have an hour and a half to get some food and get to my other job at a language school near Plaza de Espana. I don't have to prepare anything for this and its pretty much a case of sitting and chatting to people in English for half an hour at a time. It doesn't pay nearly as well though! (€7 an hour compared to €17 an hour!). Still, it's handy extra income and being an independent teacher can be a bit of a lonely experience sometimes, so working in a language school has a nice feeling of actually working with other people.

This finishes at 10pm so its usually home for dinner and to relax or out for a couple of drinks (or more on a Friday). I have to say, I don't like working evenings and I'm hoping I can cut back on that soon, but I don't fancy getting up at 6 every morning much either! I don't know why they all want to start at 8, but I've turned down several offers of classes up by the airport at 8 because I just didn't think it was worth my while (an hour there, 2 hour class, an hour back) and I thought I'd just tire myself out. Anyway, all this is earning me around €1800 a month (although I have to pay €178 social security p/m) for roughly 35 hours a week, which is more than I need but is paying off some debts slowly but surely.

In other news, I found an English speaking dentist in Prosperidad, who told me I need to have some dental surgery done. I won't go into the details but it's going to involve stitches in my mouth (shudder) which might make teaching quite interesting for a week or so. It's quite a complicated proceedure and its costing €400 (its not covered by social security). It feels kind of masochistic to be paying all this money for someone to do horrible things to my mouth but I suppose its necessary. That's happening a week on Friday anyway so we'll see how it goes.

A strange thing happened to me on Sunday, I was cooking a vegan paella at my girlfriend's new flat (which is incredible: opposite Principe Pio, newly decorated, with a view over the river and the forest and not too expensive), when I forgot the English word for something and could only remember the Spanish - "do you have any...er, cominos?" Cumin! I'm feeling a lot more confident with my basic Spanish now and will happily break it out in shops. I do wish I'd had this level when I'd arrived though. Still weighing up moving, I've got some numbers that I'm going to call tomorrow (in Spanish) but on the other hand it is very cheap here (€230 a month) and the terrace is looking like more of a reason to stay now it's getting warmer.

Locked Out

For the third day running now, I´m locked out of my flat. At the moment we only have one set of keys between three of us which is proving pretty problematic! So I´ve wondered up to an internet cafe in La Latina (the bar I wanted to check out wasn´t open yet - Madrid time again) and gained a fresh perspective on where things are by coming a slightly different way. Its wierd how your first impressions of a place are so hard to shake. I´d decided in my head where certain places were in relation to others but got it a bit wrong because of subtly curving streets and so on but as I walk around more its all becoming a bit clearer.

I´ve spent the day unsucessfully trying to hitchhike to Barcelona to see some of my old housemates from Uni. I´d decided to hitch it after having a bit of a worry about money, and realised I´d not worry about the weekend as much if I didn´t spend 50 Euro on a coach (also after the journey to Madrid I wasn´t that keen on getting on another coach for 8 hours). But a couple of drinks last night turned into a couple more and then a couple more than that, and I ended up only setting off at about 1pm. Its a 6 hour drive to Barcelona and I didn´t want to get a lift after about 3.30 in case I ended up getting stuck in the middle of nowhere come nightfall, and by the time I´d got myself into a good position to get picked up, it was too late really. So I´m setting off early tomorrow to try again, now knowing exactly where to go, although I´m a bit worried I´ve lost my hitching mojo - thats the second time in a row (and ever) that I´ve not managed to get a lift (the other one was London to Paris). I got a good tip on where to go to get out of Madrid from Hitch Wiki (http://hitchwiki.org/), which has some good advice on hitching out of cities which is notoriously difficult. No doubt I´ll have some interesting stories for you after tomorrow though, and some thoughts on Barcelona after the weekend.

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...