Week 9

By Joni

Lost in Translation: Well, I wish I was typing this from the comfort of my own home, but unfortunately the internet story continues. This week, however, there seems to have been something lost in translation in an English conversation with our building's community president.  It's annoying enough to live it out day-to-day so I'd prefer not to rehash it all in detail.  Basically internet has never been setup in our apartment and the building is responsible for preparing cables before the internet company can lay their cable and give us access to the web.  The maintenance person for our building apparently adapts the common "mañana" attitude so common here, promising to show but taking his sweet time in doing so.  I think we'd prefer to be told "It will be ready in 13 days" rather than literally being told "tomorrow" with no follow through.  To their credit, apart from having a confusing system for appointment making, Vodafone has done all that they said they would do when they said they would do it.  We are just nervous that this luck will run out with Vodafone as soon as our building gets everything in order.  Also, we are totally capable of living without constant access to the internet - the main thing is feeling less connected to friends and family in the U.S. than we're accustomed to.

Another instance of lost in translation that is both a bit more lighthearted and a great deal stranger is our experience with the library nearest our house.  Unlike most libraries, this one does not allow patrons to check-out materials.  I would understand if the library housed historic documents or special, hard-to-find books, but by everything we've seen the material seems to be both contemporary and not all that curated.  The library does, however, have all-important internet access we crave, so we headed there on Tuesday to get caught up on email and weather another round of LingoBongo job searching.  I thought it would also be a good place to study Spanish and complete that day's homework, without other distractions that come from being in the house.  But as I attempted to enter the first level of the library, a librarian stopped me and said that books were not allowed into the library (meaning I could not bring in my workbook from my Spanish class).  I was also not allowed to take in my folder because, if I understood correctly, it was too full of paper. If they were blank pages that would be fine. A notebook is fine too, and I think folders with not very many papers. Mine had far too many. A library where books cannot get in and cannot get out.  Prison for books.  So weird.

Exploring the City: As many of you may have seen on Facebook, I bought a unicycle last Wednesday. It has been

great fun riding it around Madrid, as I think it is and even more rare sight here than in the states. The woman at the bike shop told me no one ever buys unicycles from them, and I'm pretty sure it's one of the only places in Madrid where you can actually find a unicycle. On Saturday, Aaron and I took advantage of the beautiful weather and rode/walked super fast (which is easy for Aaron with his long legs) to Retiro Park for the afternoon. We found a tranquil spot in the grass to lay our blanket down and spent the afternoon studying Spanish, eating a picnic lunch, listening to Podcasts, reading, coloring, and talking to some passers-by, all the while listening to the various musicians wandering about the park. It was a wonderful, relaxing afternoon that was followed by a lengthy, indirect, and exhausting ride/fast walk home.

Sunday we intended to check out a special, temporary exhibit at the Prado Museum, but the tickets were sold out, so instead we attended an Improv comedy show with our friends Alex and María. The show was in English, thankfully, as we are not advanced enough yet to follow improv in Spanish. Oddly enough, one of the performers used to work at TtMadrid, and we had actually met the guy there several weeks prior to seeing him perform! We are finding that we often see familiar faces when we are out and about in Madrid, which feels really nice and makes it more like home. 

Memorable Meal: Aaron so graciously cooked dinner for me on Saturday while I was busy reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and it was delicious!  He made a very

traditional Spanish dish - a tortilla! Those of you not familiar with Spanish cuisine might be wondering how just one tortilla can qualify as a meal, especially for two people. Well, in Spain, a tortilla is not simply a flat bread-like food, it is more like an omelet.  Typically the egg-based dish is filled with potatoes, and for his inaugural attempt Aaron added red pepper and onion.  It was definitely a successful first go at a Spanish recipe, especially considering we didn't tend to cook anything outside of a crock-pot or casserole in the U.S.  It's also worth noting that this homemade tortilla was FAR superior to the store-bought variety Aaron had for lunch at TtMadrid during our TEFL course, which stunk up the entire school after being heated in the microwave.

Everyday Life: We've now been in our apartment for over three weeks, so it's about time we posted some photos.  Here is the grand tour:

Our street, Calle Delicias.

Welcome to our building! It is well-secured, requiring keys for two different locked doors at the entrance.

Our door is on the left; 6B. Luckily our building, despite being old, has an elevator. I'm all for getting exercise by taking the stairs, but we live on the 6th floor (which is actually the 7th floor), and much like my mom, I cannot handle circular stairs for that amount of time without getting substantially dizzy. 

As you enter, the living room/dining room is the first thing you see, and the bathroom is directly to the left. The roof you see through the window belongs to a church building. We are lucky to have it there instead of another apartment full of neighbors that can see in our windows. The church being near us also means that our apartment is very quiet because most of the week there are no people in the building. 

The bathroom is pretty small, so it was difficult to get good pictures. Bear with me. 

The shower is tall enough for Aaron, but unfortunately a bit too narrow to comfortably maneuver to shave one's legs. 

Here you can see the top of the toilet. Do you see the silver ball on top? You flush the toilet by pulling this up. Almost all toilets in Spain have this mechanism, or a button in the same spot. Not once have I seen the lever type of flusher that I am used to.

Here is another view of the living room so you can now see the dining table. You can also see that if you go into the hallway, there is a room immediately to the right. That is our bedroom. 

Upon entering our bedroom, there is a chair in the corner, and the bed is to the left.

On the far wall, we have plenty of drawers, cupboards, closet space, and shelves.

The closets are behind the mirrors.

If you return to the hallway, the next room is our narrow little kitchen that sadly does not have an oven. It is actually very rare for apartments to have what is called an "American Kitchen" with an oven. We may eventually invest in a toaster oven, but for now we are going without.

The left side of the kitchen. Yes, that is a washing machine. In Spain, washing machines are located in the kitchen. Where is the dryer, you ask? We'll get to that in a moment.

The right side of the kitchen. There are two small blue stools here in case we would want to sit at the counter, but I don't think we will ever do that when we have a perfectly functional table in the next room.

The cupboard above the sink functions solely as a clever drying rack for clean dishes. I love that they are out of sight!

Finally, at the end of the hallway, we have the spare bedroom.

The primary functions of this room are to store extra things and large objects, to iron clothing, and...

...to dry laundry! Madrid is a very dry place, so clothing actually air-dries very quickly. I don't know anyone who has a clothes dryer. 

This room also provides access to the clothesline (of which I also couldn't get a great picture) located in the interior of our building. Most buildings here have these openings in the center so the rooms can have more windows, and thus more light.

En la clase: With all the fruitless internet appointments and (slightly-less-fruitless) interviews, we've not had a lot of time to take part in the cultural activities that accompany our Spanish classes.  But this past Friday we were able to venture out with some classmates to a local tapas bar.  Our classes end at 1:30 PM, which allowed us to just beat the hordes of people that piled into this seemingly un-expecting corner restaurant.  It was nice to chat with our classmates (both in English and Spanish!), as well as trying some delicious dishes.  I don't love seafood, so I skipped out on the dish of mussels and paella, but I did really enjoy the plate of fried pork and green peppers, and the bite-sized ice-cream-filled chocolate desserts.  Aaron enjoyed everything, as always :)

In addition to having our regularly scheduled group lessons, I had the opportunity last Wednesday to take part in a free 1 on 1 lesson with a trainee currently enrolled in the Spanish version of the TEFL certification program.  I always ask a lot of questions in a group class, and so it was really great to have all the freedom to ask whatever I needed without the slight inhibition I have in class when weighing whether or not the class would benefit from my question.

Final Notes: Yesterday I interviewed with another academy and was offered and accepted the job! In addition to the job I took several weeks ago (with My Helping Shadow), I will be working for Living Languages teaching adults on Mondays and Wednesdays. Next week I should be able to tell you more about these jobs, as they both start on Monday! It will be so strange to go back to work after not having done so since ending my last job on June 19th. I'm pretty sure that, up until this hiatus, I had never gone more than three weeks with out working since I got my first job in 2005. It has been a great adventure, but I certainly look forward to having a regular routine again!

Aaron is still plugging away at the task of finding work. Like we mentioned before, it is not difficult to find a job, it's just difficult to piece together the right ones. Many of them offer teachers only a few hours a week with lessons located in the far reaches of the city, some offer strange hours with big breaks or irregular days, and some just really don't pay enough. We are also finding that it is difficult to get a job living here on a student visa because many companies are not willing to go through the legal process necessary to hire us when they could just hire a native speaker from the UK. Luckily there are many new job posts each day, so he is continuing to interview at different places.

Technically though, Aaron had his first job last week! No, not as an English teacher, but as a voice actor. One of the job posts on LingoBongo last week was seeking a "male native English speaker with an American accent around the age of 30." Not much information was provided, but Aaron sent a message of inquiry stating his background in theatre and writing. Before being officially selected for the job, Aaron had to record himself reading two sentences that were sent to him. I like to think my "voice coaching" helped him to land the role. After being chosen, Aaron then had to proofread and edit a script for a commercial for a start-up company called CIRKL that plans to offer health care plans to people with freelance jobs. The following day, he met the team of three people at the metro, then they went to the headquarters of a local bank to record the approximately 1.5 minute long script. This took only about two hours of Aaron's time, he had a great time, and he got paid! We are definitely now on the the lookout for more opportunities like this.