Piso

I really lucked out on my living situation here in Logrono as my apartment is cute, large, in a great location, and I really like my roommates AND they're far cleaner than I am. After paying to sleep somewhere for two weeks in Barcelona, Madrid, and finally Logrono, as well as living out of my 90 plus pound suitcase of summer clothes, I was really anxious to find a place to live when I arrived here. I stayed for one night in a Catholic girl's dorm a la the Exorcism of Emily Rose, and promptly relocated to a one-star hotel and then a pension.

I think on the Sunday after the Thursday that I arrived in Logrono, I made three appointments to look at apartments. Maybe it was only two, but regardless, I was in a hurry to find a place, and my over-the-phone Spanish skills are, well, not actually skills at all. I'm awful. Besides the point, I talked to my now-landlady first, Maria Jesusa, and she was really nice and seemed to ask me four or five times if I was a student, which I wasn't sure how to answer because I feel like people sometimes want to avoid renting to students. So I told her I had just graduated and she was really excited. I met her on Monday or something and looked first at the apartment that I now live, and I wanted to sign the lease then. Which might have just been laziness/anxiety. But I looked at one or two other apartments that day, and then called Maria Jesusa and moved in the next day.

I'll get to my roommates at the end of this post, but here is my best attempt at a "virtual tour." The first picture is, obviously, as you walk in. And so is the second one. How cute is our coatrack?
Above is our foyer and below is if you do a one-eighty and face our front door.


To the right in the photo above you enter our spacious living room/dining area pictured below:




Huge, I know. That is indeed my laundry on that drying rack. Spain is not a country of dryers, and since it rains almost everyday in the fall in Logrono, we have no choice but to display our garments in the living area. Also in the above photo is door to our smaller, street-facing balcony pictured in the two photos below.


So if you skip the den/dining area, you turn down the long hallway. That first door on the left is our one bathroom (there are 5 of us, and 2 are guys, and I've really never had a problem). My door is opposite the bathroom, and then there's a half-bath (currently non-functioning) right next door to the full bath.

Above, the bathroom. Below, my bedroom. It's very small, but I like it AND my landlady knocked 20 euros/month off of my rent. I was the last one to move in. Note the purple pillowcase I bought at Zara Home (along with the rest of my sheets that you can't see).


Below are two views of the kitchen. From the top one, along the right side are four floor-to-ceiling pantry doors. We do have a toaster and a microwave, but we do not have a dishwasher (which is common, of course) or a freezer that is not literally a block of ice on the inside. The door you see below is to a large terrace. The view isn't beautiful or anything, but I think it's cool. It faces the back terraces of the buildings a few meters away. It 's really nice to sit on when the weather is nice.


The washing machines are in the kitchens here for the most part. As you can see.

Now for my roommates: in the first two pictures, it's Robin, Sylvie, and Jennis (who doesn't live with me). And then in third picture it's Sascha, Sylvie, and Robin, who are all my roommates, and then Sylvie's mom, who came to visit a few weeks ago. Not pictured is Vanessa, our Spanish roommate. She's really cute and nice from what I can tell, but she works in Pamplona so she doesn't get home until late and then she always goes home to Burgos for the weekends, which seems pretty typical. I'm also kind of afraid to ask to take a photo of her because I don't know her that well (language barrier, etc.) and it's weird enough that I have a blog, much less that I'm putting pictures of other people on it. And then talking about them.

Sascha, Robin, and Sylvie are all from around the same area of Germany. Robin and Sylvie are Erasmus students, and Sascha is doing some exchange program. He's 19 and just out of high school (they have an extra year in Germany) and plays football (soccer), and sometimes does things that highlight the fact that he's only lived with his family that picks up after him and that he's slightly sexist. But overall, he's pretty nice. He lived in Dallas for a year during high school, so he speaks practically perfect English.

Sylvie and Robin are studying Spanish at their universities and they go to university together and came to Spain together, etc. They're both really cool and nice, and we are all the same age. Sylvie also lived in the US for a year, in Boston as an au pair, and has some pretty funny stories about her host mom and her obsession with the Weight Watcher's points system. She was Amy Winehouse for Halloween and I've seen pictures and she looked hilarious. The eye makeup was perfect and she made an effort to look really strung out in every photograph (although in real life, of course, she was not).

Robin is really nice, too. He's pretty quiet, so for a few weeks I always wanted to hang out with him, but found it kind of difficult. But then one day, he discovered that you could see other people's music on iTunes and he knocked on my door and we talked about music for a while. I'm really into hanging out with them. Last night Sylvie and I ate chocolate on my bed and looked at Google images of Germany for an hour or so. The three of us are going to start reading Spanish books together to improve our language aquisition. That is the one downside of living here--I don't speak Spanish except to Vanessa and she's hardly ever around. But both Robin and Sylvie are exceptionally clean, and I am really enjoying getting to know them.


I posted two of essentially the same photo because you can't tell how pretty/adorable Sylvie/Robin are in one or the other.


(The flourescent lighting in our kitchen is pretty bad.)

Tuesdays

My father has requested more information on my everyday life in Logrono, so I´m starting with my job here. I´m teaching English in several schools in pueblos outside of Logrono. My role in the classroom is pretty maleable, but mainly it´s to expose the children to a native speaker of English.

Contrary to popular thought (or really just what I thought), not everyone in Europe is bilingual. In fact, I am going to just make the blanket statement that most Spaniards only speak Castellano (what we call ¨Spanish¨) unless they live in the Basque Country or Catalunya (or one other place that I can't remember), and then they speak both Castellano and either Basque or Catalan. So the children I teach are learning English from non-native speakers, meaning the teachers have very strong Spanish accents. Many of the English teachers here speak to me in Spanish because they are embarrassed of their English, and they all complain about how poor the English education is in Spain. I must agree, but also acknowledge the fact that I didn´t start learning Spanish until I was 14 and that most US citizens feel content just to know English. So this program I´m participating in is a good one and hopefully it will get bigger with time, as I only see most of the students once a week if even that frequently.

I´m not a particularly good teacher I don´t think, but the students seem to like me. I´m rather inefficient at passing things out and other stuff you don´t think about but that takes time away from class. By Thursdays, though, I usually run a better lesson. Unlike some of the auxiliares here, my schools are really enthusiastic and thrilled to have me in the classroom, and I´m given more responsibility. Basically, I am the teacher for the day that I´m there. I don´t have to discipline the students but I do have to entertain them and try to get them to speak English for an hour each period. It´s a small task considering that it´s what allows me to live in Spain, but sometimes I take it too seriously and get annoyed at myself when activities go wrong.

Another thing to explain is the Spanish school day. Because I teach in pueblos, the school day is still broken up by siesta. In many places, the schools have switched to a 9 to 2 schedule or something that reasonably resembles that. My school days start usually between 9:30 and 10:00 am with a half hour coffee break (for the teachers, recess for the kids) around 11:30 and then a 2 hour break from 1:00 to 3:00 in the afternoon. Most of the children go home for lunch/siesta and are returned to school by a parent. Some stay at school and eat lunch from 1:00 to 2:00. Then the teachers eat lunch from 2:00 to 3:00. Every meal is 3 courses: a soup, a meat, and fruit and yogurt. We usually eat for about 35 minutes and then go to a cafe and have more coffee for 15 or 20 minutes before the children come back and class resumes from 3:00 to 5:00 pm. I eat lunch with the teachers at my schools on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and I really enjoy it.

Okay, so Tuesdays. I really enjoy Tuesdays because I get to go to three different pueblos everyday. I teach in a CRA (CRA Moncalvillo to be exact http://www.cramoncalvillo.org/), which is a rural school system with schools in five pueblos. One of the schools only has seven children. The morning begins at 9 when I meet Rosa outside of the place she does yoga, and we drive to Nalda in time to start class at 9:30. My first class is an hour with fourth graders (I think?) and there are 9 students. One of the kids, Juan, is the son of a Canadian man, so he speaks perfect English and Spanish, which can be frustrating at times as he is also a 9-year-old boy and likes to contradict me. But other than that the children are well-behaved and the view from the classroom is really pretty.

This isn't even the view from the classroom in Nalda. I've yet to take a photo of that. You can't really see it, but on the closest slope, there is a medieval structure that no one knows what it is. They think it's a hermitage.

An old photo of Nalda that I didn't take.

I didn't take this one either. I think it's a view from Nalda.

After class, I have coffee with Rosa, and the two other English teachers, Mirian and Bea. Apparently Nalda is a very politically divided town, and everyone knows whether you are a liberal or a conservative. They were explaining the situation a few weeks ago, but I didn't understand. I'll have to ask about it again. But we go to the "conservative" cafe. Hopefully only because it's across the street from the school.

After coffee, I go to a different school every week. Either Sorzano, Viguera, or Medrano. These schools are all very small. Viguera is gorgeous. It's considered the gateway to the mountains in La Rioja, and the school is adjacent to an old church.

Another photo I didn't take; this one's of Viguera.

I took the two above from the windows of the classroom.

Someone else's view from Viguera. I couldn't really find photos of Sorzano or Medrano, but there is a great casa rural that we park in front of in Sorzano. You must look: www.casajosephine.com.

From the alternating schools, I go to Entrena for the afternoon, and I do this every Tuesday. You have to drive up a hill a little ways to get to Entrena and then on the way you drive on a plateau with vineyards and it's beautiful. In Entrena, I have an hour of nothing before lunch, but now Rosa is organizing a group of teachers and I am going to help them learn more colloquial English. They are going to pay me. Rosa is just so amazing. She's always looking out for my well-being, and she was like, well you have this hour at our school (I'm supposed to teach 4 hours a day, but I have to stay at the schools for 8 hours because they are outside of Logrono) and you aren't making money when you could be, so we will pay you to teach the English teachers.

So after that hour, I eat lunch with the other teachers from the whole CRA (not as many as you'd think, maybe 12) and we get coffee at this really funny cafe where there are only old men inside. Actually that's most cafe's here during the day.

After lunch, I teach a sixth grade class. There's a large concentration of interesting haircuts in this particular class. One little girl has shoulder length hair but the crown of her head has really short, spiked, boyish hair. It's like a pixie cut with a 2.5 inch radius on the top of her head and then everything else is just standard girl hair. I have no idea who thought of that one. And then of course there's the obligatory rat tail and maybe a mohawk or two. So normal here.

Then I teach a class that's third and fourth grade. It's huge--maybe 24 students--and they're all really cute and funny and like to run and hug me when I walk into the room. Then school ends at 5:00 and I ride back into Logrono with a teacher named Christina. My only complaint about Tuesday is that I don't get to stay in each pueblo longer, and they are all the prettiest pueblos of the week. I would really like an hour to walk around each one. But maybe one day.

Both Entrena, neither mine.

Riojan Road Trip

the view from Laguardia

NOTE: I am coming down with a cold and I've noticed that my English is deteriorating (both in writing and in speech) so please forgive the lack of sentence variety and whatever else makes something easy to read. The pictures are the most important part, no?

Yesterday Jennis and I rented a car and drove through the northern part of La Rioja and the sourthern part of the Basque country where Riojan wine is produced. Our car was the smallest, greenest car I've every seen but very cute and wonderful for our purposes. Jennis is an excellent stickshift driver (no one here uses automatics) and parallel parker. And our timing was perfect: the day was absolutely beautiful after almost two weeks of rain in La Rioja, and the leaves of the vines have changed colors. We spent most of the day without plans just driving from one pueblo to the next, trying to find the best view and occassionally something to eat. Our only plan was to meet Rosa, the vice principle at one of my schools and the woman who has been taking care of everything I need since June, at the pueblo where she grew up to see her family's bodega.

We started our morning in Laguardia, which is part of the Basque Country and had a beautiful view. We spotted a town nearby while overlooking the vineyards and decided to drive there. The town was called Elvillar and the roads to get there were indulgent almost-switchbacks through vineyards. We walked around a bit before heading for El Ciego, where Frank Ghery designed a bodega/hotel for Marques de Riscal. I wasn't impressed by his work there; it looked like the Guggenheim only some of the metal was bright purple (for grapes?) and you can see too much of the building that isn't covered in metal waves. Plus, our requests for a tour were rejected--apparently you have to make reservations in advance. So we drove closer into the town of El Ciego where we ate a tapa at a bar where they gawked silently at our English speaking and then we stopped at an Enoteca for a glass of wine. It was a most enjoyable experience and we stood outside with the other 20 people who were having midday glasses in the sun. Jennis spotted a really pretty group of vines growing on some cube structure where we parked out car too.

first: a park in Laguardia
second: approaching Elvillar
third: on the road
fourth: vines in the parking lot, El Ciego

After El Ciego, we drove to Cenicero (which means "ashtray" in Spanish). We couldn't find lunch there and it wasn't as pretty as expected so we moved on to Briones, a mideival town that everyone has said was so pretty. It was absolutely gorgeous and we were able to go inside the cathedral. I'll have to go back because we couldn't spend enough time there; we were meeting Rosa in Rodezno, her pueblo, around 4:00 pm and we only arrived in Briones at 3:00.

first: a bull on the highway
second: the cathedral in Briones
third: inside the cathedral
fourth: more Briones

So after walking around for an hour, we drove to Rodezno, where Rosa picked us up at the cathedral. She drove us a kilometer or so out of town to a hill where families own small bodegas. These bodegas are comparable to lake houses: a second home where families get together for meals and make wine in small amounts for friends and families. Rosa's mother and sister-and-law were at the bodega, which had a dining room with a long table and a fire place, and wine cellar. We ate some cod cooked Riojan style and some chorrizo and tried the wine that they make there. It was Rosa's mother's birthday so we also enjoyed coffee and champagne and some small pastries. Rosa and her family were so welcoming and they showed us how they make wine there and we sat and talked by the fire and enjoyed the view from the bodega. Kelly, another American who studied abroad in Logrono a few years ago and moved back last year, met us at the bodega along with her Spanish boyfriend, Jorge. Rosa took us for a walk up the hill of bodegas to a field of grape vines which is actually now owned by a huge bodega that everyone in Rodezno opposes. Then we visited her sister-in-law's bodega that is bigger and has a hundreds of year old wooden barrel for wine storage that they don't use anymore.

After that, Rosa drove Jennis, Jorge, Kelly, and I down the hill to Rodezno proper and we visited the cathedral as everyone was leaving mass. An older Spanish woman explained a story about Eric the Belgian, a very famous relic theif from the 1960s who robbed several Spanish churches of priceless objects and then later "repented" and charged them to return the relics. Apparently he had stolen something from the church in Rodezno as well, I can't remember what though.

We said our goodbyes to Rosa, and then followed Jorge and Kelly to Haro, a famous wine town in La Rioja, for tapas. It was fun there but our first tapa filled us up and it was getting cold, so Jennis and I returned to Lorgono within an hour.

Rosa and me

Rosa's mother and Jennis

the view from Rosa's bodega

inside the bodega

Rosa explaining how they make the wine

fermenting wine

Rodezno from the bodega

Jorge, Rosa, Jennis, and Kelly walking uphill

vines at night

People eat white asparagus here and it's disgusting. This is some "white asparagus" made of chocolate which might actually be grosser than the real thing. We found it in the window of a candy store in Haro.

Barcelona Redux

I returned to Barcelona for Halloween weekend from Friday, October 31 to Monday, November 3. I stayed with Jennis at the flat her father owns there. It was really relaxing to stay in a home and know that we can come back and see everything we didn´t see this time. And it was great to go with a someone who has been to Barcelona before (Jennis lived there for 9 months in college and has been coming to Spain every summer since she was 11).

We bought our train tickets a month before because they were on sale. Our first train left Logrono at 4:04 am and arrived in Zaragosa at 5:55 am, and then we took the high speed AVE from Zaragosa at 6:57 and arrived in Barcelona around 9:00 am. It was a ridiculous itinerary, mostly because we decided not to stay up all night on Thursday night before leaving Friday morning. So we went to sleep at about 12:30 am on Thursday night/Friday morning and woke up at 3:00 am. Fortunately, Jennis lives across the street from the train station and she has a trundle bed so I stayed with her. We arrived at the train station over 20 minutes early. I´ve decided that train stations at night are creepy. When we boarded the train, there was a guy asleep in our car and he was blocking the door so that was a bit awkward, but other than that the train ride to Zaragosa was uneventful save for our paranoia that we would fall asleep and miss our stop. The AVE ride from Zaragosa to Barcelona was lovely; I listened to Vince Guaraldi and watched the sunrise between falling asleep.

When we arrived in Barcelona, we immediately went to sleep. I slept until about 2 pm and then we ate lunch at a place below us and wandered around Born, where Jennis´ dad´s place is. The restaurant where we ate lunch is called Il Pasatore and it has a menu del dia (starter, main course, dessert, and water or wine) for €6.90! Incredible, I know. And it´s actually good food.

It rained on Friday and we went on a rather jarring shopping adventure. We were looking for a slip for me and these Geox boots for Jennis, but along the way I had a woman tell me that I wear a size XXL American, and Jennis got kicked by an Italian man because she wouldn´t give him 50 cents. That was actually depressing and awful. The stores are full from about 6 to 9 pm here, so we were leaving an overwhelming department store and there were a lot of people around and we were on La Rambla, the huge touristy street in Barcelona. And this guy we passed asked Jennis for money and she just said no and turned away and then he kicked her shin really hard and called her a bitch and a whore in Italian. We turned around and just stood there, completely shocked. No one around us said or did anything and neither did we.

We went back to the apartment empty handed and got ready to eat dinner and go out. Fortunately, our evening got better. We ate at a crepes place where we met a group of Argentinians, one of whom was a graphic designer in Buenos Aires, I believe. We then walked to Barceloneta (the area near the ocean) and ended up spending the rest of the night at a place called Diobar. It was incredibly fun; we danced to Michael Jackson-y music and met a group of people from Milan who were living in Barcelona.

On Saturday, we woke up late and wondered around Born and tried to eat lunch at La Boqueria, a huge market, but it was closed because it was All Saint's Day or something? So we got french fries at McDonald's instead and had our first Top Shop experience.

first: Caracoles, a famous restaurant (we didn't eat there this time)
second: the upper (less touristy) portion of La Rambla

We continued walking up La Rambla passing several Gaudi buildings and then we ended up in Gracia, an area in Barcelona that is very neighborhoody and lovely. We wondered around until about 6:30 when we got coffee and a call from one of the Italians from the night before inviting us to a dinner and post-Halloween party. On our way back to Born from Gracia we encountered a small outdoor concert and several older Catalan people dancing La Sardana, a Catalan folk dance that I believe was outlawed during Franco's reign. It was really cool and the Sardana band was great. I managed to get a little video of it.

first: Gaudi's Casa Batllo
second: a view of the ceiling of Gaudi's La Pedrera
third: a plaza in Gracia
fourth: dancing La Sardana

We met the Milanese group in front of Jennis' apartment and walked a short ways to the dinner party behind the Arc de Triumph. The party was really fun and everyone there was super nice and cute and welcoming. If I lived in Barcelona, I would want to be real friends with these people. Most were dressed up. No one in Spain really celebrates Halloween and when they do, they dress up as zombies or witches or just the typical scary/spooky stuff. So there was some zombie makeup available to everyone. A few of the girls were dressed as the twins from The Shining. Almost everyone there was Italian and most were from Milan. And most didn't speak Spanish, only English. Someone's friend had rented a bar in northern Barcelona, so after a dinner of a few shared frozen pizzas, we relocated to the bar which was also really fun. Jennis and I were without a doubt the only Americans there, and on a projector screen, the bar played a bunch of clearly google-image-searched photos from American horror films.

On Sunday, Jennis and I ate kebabs at a place near her house and then we parted ways for a few hours. She went to meet up with a woman who might be able to get her a job in Barcelona next year, and I went to a cafe I had been to my first time in Barcelona to use their wireless and have a coffee. We met up again at 5:00 pm and took a long walk around Barceloneta to the beach before heading home and getting ready for dinner. We ate at a chic but mediocre fast noodle place before we drank mojitos at a bar that has the best mojitos in Barcelona.

The Mediterranean from Barceloneta

We spent Monday morning cleaning the apartment and walking around Born some more. Of course the weather was perfect for the first time all weekend, but we had to leave for the train station at about 3:00 pm. We visited a really great design bookstore before lunch and I found a few books that I might need.

first: Born and I believe the Church of Santa Maria del Mar
second: the view from the back of Jennis' apartment
third: a cute chocolate shop we walked into
fourth: a green shadow made by the pharmacy cross (how artsy)