Hey there 14-year-old girl!

So you are in 2º ESO and you don't want to learn English? It's just not for you, you say?



Well, I think you should.



Why's that you say?

Oh no they di'int!

Oh I dunno. Maybe because in 4 days Twilight's Breaking Dawn: Part 1 opens and all 1326 showings of the dubbed version in Plaza Mayor will be sold out.

The one that will have seats available?

Original Version Subtitled.

I suggest you start studying tonight.

Public Service Announcement

Attention tourist shops in Spain and the middle-aged man at my gym:

This shirt has never been and never will be funny, unique, or creative.

Please stop making it. Please stop selling it. Please stop buying it. Please stop wearing it to lift weights in the afternoon.

Please. Stop.

Not fair

Spanish accent in English: sexy, adorable, intriguing, intelligent...

Cool.

Anglo accent in Spanish: nails on chalkboard, ambulance sirens, kind of dumb, cats in heat, failboat....

Not cool.

Some people have all the luck.

A is for. . . .um. . . .uh . . .

My tiniest student, David, is going to be super good at English. Why? Because at the tender age of 3 his parents began a pretty hard-core English regimen with him: cartoons in English, dad speaks to/at him in English, and I walk on down twice a week to have classes with him.

A three year old is hard to have for private classes. Even though we only have a half hour, after about fifteen minutes he jumps up and starts running in circles or throwing Gormiti toys around. Once calmed down, we resume our song or dance or whatever.

This year I have spent part of the time teaching him the alphabet song. My seven year old, Claudia, knows how to say all the letters in English and it's really convenient when I have to spell new words for her. So with David, we sing that song about 10 times each class while making an alphabet book. You know, the kind with cute pictures of words that start with that letter.

A for apple:

B for ball. C for cat:

Standard alphabet stuff. The only problem is, with certain letters, my mind goes absolutely blank on any word in English appropriate for his level that starts with that letter. No simple nouns, no easily illustratable animals, nothing. So here, after flipping through his brother's learn to draw book full of animals, we find J for jaguar:

Not bad, nice recovery. Here's I for insect, also found after consulting the book:

Then there's S for um, snake:

At V, I totally failed. V for vendetta? Nope, not appropriate. V for vandalism? Tampoco. V for verrrrry stupid English teacher? Probable, but nope. I came up with V for

VIPER!

Trying to explain the subtle anatomical differences between snakes and vipers clearly did not go over well, as this one looks like an apartment building with a tail rather than a snake or a muscle car.

The bad news? I still haven't gotten to W, X, Y, or Z.

X for Xerox copies? Y for yoda? Help!

Notes on pasta

Why is it SO HARD to make an appropriate amount of pasta for one person for lunch?!

AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS THIS PROBLEM?!

Excuses

This weekend was ridiculously cold and rainy in Málaga. (Well, when I say ridiculous, I mean ridiculous for Southern Spain.)

The sun came out for a minute for this picture. This is a reduced form of
puddle of death that forms outside my door, aka Lake Teatinos.

It's not usually cold and rainy here, so people don't really do much when it is. It is an awesome understanding that the whole city is in on: I don't go out, you don't go out, we don't go out, nobody gives anybody shit for it.

I had a weekend plan of going to the Oktoberfest downtown, drinking beer out of a huge jar, and hopefully adding to my drunken hat collection, now 3 hats strong! But, it rained. So I stayed in at José's house and we watched soccer.

Do I feel bad for not going out?

Nope. Because I'm pretty sure nobody else was there either.

This is why it's awkward

Yet another round of waiting in line for hours on end in the relentless pursuit of this year's foreigners card.

• Oficina de Extranjeros: 3ish hours of useless waiting. They told me since I already had a number I just had to go to the Police Station.
  
• Day One at the Police Station: 1 hour of semi-useless waiting. I did get a complete list of documents and photocopies I had to provide as well as the form I needed to pay the tax.
  
• Day Two at Police Station: 10 minutes of useless waiting. I arrived with all documents and was trying to enter when, at 1:40, before their schedule 2 p.m. closing time, that they wouldn't let anyone else in. It was a new, highly unpleasant security guard who, when I notified him that the office indeed hadn't closed yet, looked at me with his eyebrows raised, shrugged angrily, and said "That's it, no more, what more can we do?" What can you do? Well if you work Monday to Friday 9 - 2, actually work until 2. Boy those 25 hour weeks get long.
  
• Day Three at Police Station: 2 hours of useless waiting. Normally the line in the police station isn't as long, but when I arrived there was a line of about 50 people outside and probably another 20 inside. After waiting and watching the new security guard utterly fail to attend to the needs of the public in a timely and pleasant manner, he brusquely picked up the signs for the foreigners line, slammed the door shut, and informed us that the office was closed. Nevermind the line hadn't moved for like 30 minutes, telling us before that we wouldn't be able to get in would be too easy.
  
• Day Four at Police Station: 1 hour and success! I arrived before school and breezed inside, noting that my favorite doorman must be on some sort of break. The woman at the desk thumbed through my papers, they banged out a few fingerprints, I'm on my merry way.

What I did have time to put my finger on is why exactly waiting at the foriegner's office is worse than waiting at the numerous other bureaucratic institutions that we have to deal with here in the land of Catholic holidays and cigarette breaks: personal space.

The average line at these foreigner's offices is composed of Central and South Americans, Africans, Asians, Middle Easterners, old men, young families, working professionals, super awesome and ridiculously good looking blonde auxiliars, babies, etc. etc. Every single one of these groups has a different understanding of the etiquette of waiting in line.

For example, young Moroccan man with the scar from his lip to his face, I see you trying to cut in front of me. You keep inching forward, but I, in fact, have peripheral vision.

Family from Africa with two adolescents, a toddler, and a baby: spread on out, there's room for all in the hallway, no need to maintain any semblance of a line.

Woman from South America: Please, keep moving forward behind me, get in here right close like. I love being three inches away from strangers.

An equivalent feel for this awkwardness:

Until (hopefully) next year, foreigner's office!