First month in Spain

After one month and 13 days in Spain, I can say with certainty that coming to Spain is one of the best decisions I have made in my life.  It has been quite an experience and the people here have welcomed me with open arms.  My days consist of being a language assistant at my school throughout the morning and in the afternoon I have my private classes.  Actually let me rephrase that, my days consist of being a language assistant in the morning, visiting a teashop and gorging myself on lovely Moroccan food, taking a siesta, and then having my private classes in the afternoon/evening. 

 

My school is wonderful.  I have been there for a month and the folks there are fantastic and courteous.   I help with the art lessons and on occasion with the English lessons.   Every morning I check in with the principal and then become a linguistic English sounding board in the classroom.  The way it works at my school is that the kids learn English grammar and theory in one class, and then they have to use this theory and grammar in their art class.  In my opinion, this is genius.   The kids, unbeknownst to them, are learning English grammar and are then required to apply it in a real-world situation.  The result is that the kids end up building up vocabulary in art that is only accessible to them in English and not in Spanish or Galician.  For the month of October, my students spent the month constructing monsters from recycling material and the end results are amazing.  To help inspire them, I read them a story called Under the Bed and showed them the opening song from The Nightmare Before Christmas.   The younger kids colored monsters, which were just as great; they got very creative with the colors and then decorated their monsters with all kinds of stickers.   For the month of November, I’m going to attempt to have my older kids make dream-catchers and my younger kids make Native American shields. 

After leaving school, I stroll on over to the Moroccan teashop and buy some delicious bocadillos and cookies.  It has become a regular thing where the shop-owner looks for me around the same time every day. This place has the most delicious cookies I have tasted thus far in Spain.   Some days I buy bocadillos, the name for Spanish subs, or other days I will buy empanadas or pizzas. The Moroccan tea there is fantastic as well. After enjoying some delicious food, I go home for my midday siesta.

My private classes are another favorite part of my day.  All the private students I have are fantastic.  They are witty and they force me to think about things that I may not have ever thought about in English before.  For example, why do we say “shower as /shau-wuhr/ and not as /sho-wuhr/ because it looks like shower would come from the word “show”.   I enjoy my private students because I can teach them standard English and some slang English and the environment is a bit more relaxed than a formal classroom. 

All in all, I am happy that I am in Spain.  I’ve gone traveling to other sites within Galicia but that’ll be another blogpost.  I have also realized that there are specific phonemes that one needs to be wary of when teaching English to Spaniards that doesn’t appear when teaching English to Hispanics but that’ll have to be a separate post.

Beginnings in Ribeira

Last week my friend Jesus met me in Santiago de Compostela to help me go apartment hunting in Ribeira. Now a little bit about my friend, he’s Valencian, an excellent companion on trips, honest,a bit maleducado some times, and does not speak a lick of English.  Truth be told, he makes any trip interesting.

La rata voladora según Jesus 

Jesus met me at the bus station in Santiago and we got ready to go and explore the town I’d be at for the next two years.  The  bus ride was a lot longer than it should have been.  It was supposed to be two hours but it seemed that we bumped into every bit of traffic that we could possibly encounter.  The trip ended up taking about three hours.   As we passed each town we kept  remarking at all their beauty until we got to one town and we both said “Uff que feo” without realizing that it was Ribeira.   Ribeira is a town of about 14,000 people sitting right on the river bank.  It’s the main fishing port of Galicia and I believe it is the most important port that Galicia has. After remarking about how hideous Ribeira was, we hopped on the bus and embarked on finding the hostel.  Jesus and I lugged my luggage up a hill which seemed to be the longest walk in my life (it’s amazing how adding 60lbs to any trek makes it take forever).  When my friend and I checked in, the woman asked us if we wanted the married couple’s room.  I am not sure what gave this lady the impression that my friend and I were married, but neither of us were wearing a ring.  We quickly declined and asked for a room with two beds.  We arrived in the room and relaxed for a bit before heading out to get lunch.

This church was our main reference point for traveling around the town. 

For lunch we went to a place and ordered the Menú del dia.  I had no idea, but the norm in Spain is to order a 3-course meal with lunch and dinner.   These 3-course meals normally include free wine and tonic water with bread.  And the best part, it’s dirt cheap.  For the first course I had potaje, which was awesome.  Potaje is essentially a chickpea soup with different types of meat and fatback in it.  Later on I found out that there are multiple types of potaje, and I cannot wait to try them all.  The serving was rather generous and  it was unbelievably delicious.  For the second course I had paella de marisco.  This is essentially seafood rice dish that is very rich and was loaded with saffron.   After eating both these dishes with a bit of bread and wine, I could not manage any desserts for the third course.  The Menú del dia was dirt cheap too.  It was 10 euros a person but the owner knocked it down to 9 per person because we didn’t eat dessert. The owner of the restaurant was a friendly man, he started telling jokes with us and goofing off.

Look at how gorgeous this landscape is. It's stunning. 

This is a view from the shore

After eating this large amount of food, my friend and I went wandering around the city to start looking for apartments.   Which was its own adventure in its own right. We soon discovered that although Ribeira is not the prettiest city with the most stuff to do, it is full of pleasant people with the most beautiful landscape.  Everyone from the hostel clerks to random people on the street were very pleasant to us and helped us navigate the town.   

This is another view looking back on the town from another part of the coast. 

My next post will be about my interesting experience with trying to find a place to live.

Traveling to Spain!

I arrived in Spain last Tuesday in the morning and I must say, passing through their border was fantastic! The woman just looked at my passport and stamped it and she did not ask any questions.  Last year when I lived in Scotland for 2 months I had to pass through the border at Heathrow and the man there played 20 questions with me before allowing me to pass.   Spain has it set up a bit weird, apparently you pass through the border once you enter Spain but you don’t go through customs until you get to your final destination.  Which would’ve been perfect for me, but like a klutz I checked in one of my carry-on bags right before the flight from JFK to Madrid with its end destination being Madrid. As soon as I passed the border in Madrid, I realized this little mistake and hauled arse to get to the belt to quickly grab my backpack before I lost it forever in Madrid.

With backpack finally in hand, I had unknowingly past the point of no return in the airport meaning that I had to go back through security again with my carry-on luggage. I was an unhappy camper, but I just bit my tongue and quickly went through security again.  I realized afterward that Spain is the only country I have been in where they do no tell you the actual location of your terminal until like 1 hour ahead of time.  This would be perfectly okay if the airport in Madrid wasn’t so large.  My lay over was only 3 hours but I spent an hour and a half of it being lost and figuring out how to re-enter the airport.  Then finally I realized I had no idea where I was going, and apparently that was okay because Spain had no idea where my plane was going to land either.  Once I found out the gate number I hauled arse again and the walk still took like 20 minutes to get to that side of that airport. 

Once on the side of the airport I quickly boarded for my third and final flight from Madrid to Santiago de Compostela. The flight was only 50 minutes long which was wonderful.  Well it was wonderful until the lovely lady in front of me decided to recline her seat all the way back and was practically resting her head on my knees.  The chair was crushing my kneecaps at first but I managed to cross my legs to avoid the pain.  It helped at first but after 20 minutes like that, I tried to get the woman’s attention to tell her that she was hurting me, but then the intercom goes off saying we’d be landing shortly and to return chairs to normal position.  I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.  The man beside me was watching the entire situation and kept asking if I was alright and I just kept saying “No se preocupe, sobreviviré.”

Once landing in Santiago I went through customs with my luggage.  This was fantastic again, the man only asked if I had anything to claim and I graciously said “No!” and he allowed me to pass without filling out any paperwork. I was so excited to finally be leaving.  I quickly grabbed a taxi and went to my hotel to rest for a few hours. 

I stayed at San Lazaro Hotel and it was delightful.  The lady at the front desk was unbelievably helpful and answered all my questions and recommended some places on a map.  My room was beautiful and my bathroom was fantastic.  After a few hours I got up and scoured the streets looking for a bite to eat.  This was the first time culture shock hit me, I forgot that Spaniards don’t actually eat dinner until like 9pm or so. I was looking for a place to eat around roughly 7pm. Every place I walked by seemed to be closed except for the restaurant attached to my hotel.  I walked in and ordered chicken and rice and it was amazing. It was one of the best chicken and rice dishes I have ever had in a long time.   I then left the restaurant and walked around a bit more to try to discover the town a bit.  After that brief walk, I returned to the hotel and went to sleep because the following day I was going to meet my friend Jesus and go on a whirlwind of adventures with him.

Phones, phones, and more phones!

Back in May I received the fantastic news that I'd be teaching youngsters in a small fishing town in Galicia in Spain this coming school year. I was so thrilled that I started thinking, "Oh goodness what do I do about my phone?!"  Well I did some digging and some research and found out some stuff on Spanish phones that'll be super helpful to other new Auxiliars.


Part 1- CDMA or GSM (Spain uses GSM)


In the world there are two networks that dominate the cell phone market, CDMA-Code Division Multiple Access and GSM-Global System for Mobile communications. The quickest way to check to see if your phone is CDMA or GSM is to just take off the back and look around your battery (or underneath it) and see if you have a SIM or microSIM slot. It looks something like this:


This is a phone with a SIM card slot.  Normally the phone will have a slot that'll have a little picture that looks like a rectangle with one its corners cut off ( I guess a trapezoid?).  On this picture, it's the little picture with the arrow pointing upward.  That shows you how to orient the SIM card which surprisingly is shaped like a trapezoid too! If your phone has one of these slots you're in luck! Spain only uses GSM.

If you don't see this slot, don't fret. It just means you have a CDMA phone like me.  This means your phone will NOT work in Spain. Well, fret a little bit, because you're about to have to spend money.  If looking at the back of your phone still doesn't help you out, you can always google your cell phone service provider and see if they even offer GSM models of your phone.  If you have a CDMA phone, you will need to actually purchase an unlocked GSM phone so that you can use it in Spain.

Part 2- Check Frequencies on GSM phone

Now the next thing to note is that not all phones can operate on all frequencies of GSM networks.  In the United States, the GSM network is at 1900MHz/850MHz and 1700MHz/2100MHz.  If you're able to use your GSM phone in the US, it's probably working on one of those two frequencies.

Spain uses different frequencies.  To have your GSM phone successfully work in Spain it needs to be able to pick up  900MHz/1800MHz for simple 2g service and 2100MHz for 3g.

To figure out if your phone will work, just google it online and see what frequencies it works on.  Normally it's listed under "specifications" for your phone on whatever website you choose to go to.  If your phone shows that it works on the frequencies for Spain, you should be good to go so that when you get in Spain all you gotta do is buy a SIM card and call it a day. But if your phone doesn't work on that frequency, then refer to Part 3 because you'll be riding the struggle bus with us CDMA folks.

Part 3-  Poor CDMA folks, the struggle is really real for us 

Last time I traveled abroad, I bought a terrible phone from vodafone and said, next time I'm bringing an unlocked phone. So for the CDMA folks, you will have to buy a phone.  You can buy it when you're in Spain or buy it before your trip.  When searching for phones you want it to be "unlocked" and you want to check the specifications to make sure it works on Spain's frequencies.   See Part 4 for the info on "unlocked" phones.  You can easily buy a phone on Amazon or ebay that matches the frequencies found in Spain that is unlocked.  You may want to consider buying a "quad band" phone which means it works on several frequencies (in other words, you can almost use it anywhere in the world).   The phone I bought is a LG Optimus that is quad band.  It works on several frequencies and I got it for 200 bucks. This means I'll be able to use it in Spain and in the US when I return.  Once you buy your GSM unlocked phone, you're all set to go.  Just make sure that it definitely has Spain's frequencies listed.

So in a nutshell

1.) Search "unlocked GSM phone" on google
2.) Make sure it lists Spain's frequencies (900MHz/1800MHz for 2g and 2100MHz for 3g) in its specifications
3.) Click buy and dance around like you're Janelle Monae on a tightrope.


Part 4- Unlock the phone 

Alright my GSM folks, this is the final part before you too can dance like your CDMA brethren and dance like Janelle Monae.

Once you realize your phone works on Spain's frequency, you have to get your phone unlocked.  This can be as simple as a phone call to your service provider.  If they refuse to do it, call again and ask someone else.  If it seems like they just won't do it at all, then you can wait until your in Spain and go to a little shop that will unlock it for you.  From former Auxliars, it seems that this only costs about 15 to 30 euros.  

"Unlocking" your phone means you're effectively removing your phone from any carrier like Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Cricket, AT&T, etc and that way you can take your phone to any carrier.  Majority of phones purchased at a carrier are "locked" into those carriers and cannot be configured to be used with another network without "unlocking".  Phone companies "lock" their phones so they can let you buy super high-tech phones at subsidized rates once you agree to their contracts for a set period of time. An "unlocked" phone, is not with any carrier and this allows you to freely put in a SIM card and operate your phone on any network. 

I have gathered a lot of this information from other Auxiliars' blogs and random posts on the Internet. Here you can find the network coverage of many countries- GSM Coverage