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

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.

Tortilla and Grafitti

So far so...

I made my second attempt at cooking tortilla, or Spanish omlete, this week after a bit of a disaster last time. I decided to loosely follow 2 recipes off the internet (the top two when you search 'tortilla recipe') which are slightly different but I opted to put a bit of chopped red pepper in with my potatoes and onion. You always seem to need less potato than you think, which was my main downfall last time (result: potato and scrambled egg). Without going into too much detail, you fry the onions and taters, whisk some eggs, add them together and then pour the mixture into a frying pan, and let it cook before flipping it over, which is where things get interesting. I find it inconceivable that this dish was invented before the advent of non-stick pans. I was doing fairly well with our battered old definately non non-stick pan, shaking it as the mixture solidifies so it didn't stick (good tip), when the handle promptly came off.

...oh.

The instructions on the recipes are invariably a bit vague on the flipping bit, but your supposed to do it by putting a plate on the pan and quickly turning it over. This is no simple feat when your pan doesn't have a handle but I just about managed it using a tea towel only to find the bloody thing stuck to the bottom in the middle. Luckily, it was still unset enough to sort of mould together in the end to make something resembling the traditional cake-like shape, and after a couple more flips I was getting the hang of it. Everything fell apart a bit upon serving but by that point I was just glad to get it on the plate! Everyone agreed it tasted great though, especially with a bit of chili sauce.

Win!

What does it mean?

Also this week, we went to do another challenge: one close to my heart - find the most 'ducks and ghosts' (around Plaza de España). I've been wanting to know what these are all about since I first spotted them when I got here. All over Madrid, you'll spot these big stickers of a duck with a big bill and a ghost shaped like a 't'. I still don't know what its about (neither the internet nor Spanish friends have been any use) but between the two teams we managed to find at least 15 in an hour, including two massive ones right on the front of the Edifico de España.

I also took the opportunity to take some pics of some other street art in and around Malasaña. Street art and grafitti is a big deal in Madrid, and you'll see it everywhere you go, from quickly sprayed tags to huge detailed pieces (see right). You can find some of the best pieces on shop shutters because apparently shutters used to get covered in tags until at some point shops started paying the best grafitti artists to take time doing proper work on them, instead of a quick tag and run, which no-one else sprays over. It's become very mainstream and you'll see them on everything from off-licenses (bottles) to dentists (workmen removing teeth), often with the artists name and number at the bottom. I read recently that they're cracking down on this in Barcelona and fining the shop keepers, which is a shame because they aren't just crap tags, a lot of them are really good pieces of art and brighten up the streets enormously.

I also managed to get a picture of a typical Madrid dog this week as well, I spotted this guy tied up in the entrance to a supermarket and he's a classic: small, well dressed and probably about to shit everywhere. Some of the dog-fashion on display on the street is really quite hilarious, everything from coats, to sweaters, anoraks and neckercheifs, all on tiny little dogs being walked by otherwise normal-looking people. Very strange.

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!