a giveaway, of sorts

I just discovered I have one postcard stamp left. To anywhere in the world.

And two postcards: one of the Laudio main square, which is awesome because Laudio is like BFE, Alava, and you wouldn't expect them to have a postcard, and yet they do. The other is an artsy depiction of a Basque farm lady bringing her astoa (that's donkey, duh) and some fresh vegetables to market.

I mention all this because I'm sending one to one of you. Just post a comment on this post by 5 PM Basque time on May 20th. You can specify "Laudio" or "Lady + donkey" if you like. I'll choose one at random from the comments, contact you for your mailing address, and send you a postcard. I'll write things to you on it.



Enter or this guy will club you with a spoon.


That's it! have at it.

a festival, and students

Laudio had its annual feria right before the Giant Humongous Two Week Spring Break. The festival meant lots of stands with local food...



Idiazabal cheese-on-bread pintxos



Basque cakes


...Tractors (no photos of those, but you're not missing out much - it's pretty much all John Deere over here too, if you're interested in that stuff), livestock...


Some delightfully patriotic cows


(as a side note, at the end of the row of really beautiful horses they had were a cluster of decidedly not-beautiful horses. Hanging over their sides was a sign that said "Horses for meat." What up, culture shock?!?)

...and as an added bonus, my last class got to skip its lesson. Instead, the other (i.e. real) teacher and I took the class over to the feria.

today´s post brought to you (unknowingly) by Laudio BHI

My students this week have been writing stories.

I give them a list of words, they get in groups and have to write stories using all of the words. I thought I´d share some of their results. I didn´t edit anything. The word lists were:

mango ugly sofa toilet embarrassed coffee Lady Gaga giraffe kiss dance skateboard chicken

or:

car Bart Simpson octopus fat Cristiano Ronaldo beautiful silly apples run gross sing foot

And now, the results.

Once upon a time, Bart Simpson throws a green and delicious apple to Cristiano Ronaldo and made him stupid. He run to the hospital but when he is arriving he imagines an octopus near his foot. And he say:
-Oh it is a beautiful fat octopus.
When he finished the vision, goes to the hospital and the nurse says:
-Cristiano Ronaldo the silliest and grossest person in the world is singing a song in the car.

In toilet Lady Gaga is drinking coffe, later she is dancing in sofa. The chicken is ugly and she eat mango. She is embarrassed with her giraffe. because it mount in a skateboard. the giraffe kiss very well.

Cristiano Ronaldo is very gross and silly man. This man is very stuck-up. that´s why the persons doesn´t like it, Meanwhile Bart Simsomp a beautiful happy and funy boy, his favorite food is apples and he sing very good but cristiano ronaldo sing very bad.

The ugly of Lady Gaga was dancing in the sofa kissing a mango. The giraffe was jealous. It was dancing in the street and it triped with a skateboard and it got embarrassed and it went to its toilet to cry. Another day Lady Gaga and her mango were eating chicken and the giraffe ate the mango. the giraffe was thirsty, so it dronk a coffee. When Lady Gaga saw her mango eaten she shot the giraffe.

amereotypes

that's stereotypes about Americans, for those of you who aren't into puns of the "Daaaaad, you're embarrassing me!" variety.



Not a false stereotype at all, but what I spent a good $40 on at the State Fair last year. Followed by another $5 on Tums.


In the past couple weeks I have had my students ask me:

-if I know anyone famous (no)

-if I drive an expensive car (no)

-if I have lots of money (of course; I teach English for the Spanish government. If the Spanish gov isn't a high rollin' boss I don't know who is)

-if I eat hamburgers all the time (come on, be serious)

-if I like Eminem (see hamburgers answer)


Some day I'm going to respond by asking them if they've blown up any buildings or won any Michelin stars lately.***



***these are the only two stereotypes Americans even come close to having about Basque people. Because terrorism and haute cuisine are the only things that make it through to us, best case scenario. I'm sure you could tease another good generalization about Americans being ignorant out of there somewhere.

coming soon: field guide to Spanish junk food. I'm pretty pumped about it.

I've always wondered about creative ways to alter that particular graffiti...

I'm heading out in a few minutes to pick up my friends Jessica and Allison (of "I know them from Sevilla" fame). They're also student teaching, but in Madrid. Tomorrow morning we head out to Donosti, where they will be dazzled by the perfect sunshine and 18 degree Celsius weather and I will honor their visit by taking them to great pintxos bars, walking them up Monte Urgull and putting them through some sort of basque hazing. Until I return, I leave you all with this fabulous moment I experienced this morning:


Today at school in the teachers' lounge, I saw that someone had carved "ETA" on one of the tables.

Someone else had carved a "T" in front of it.

Graffiti win.

jappy jalloween

I keep making weird foods here. This one felt appropriate for Halloween because it was inspired by a classic of Adelaide, South Australia known as the AB, which stands for - warning, totally gross - AfterBirth. The original AB consists of Aussie chips, gyro meat and the sauce trio of tzatziki, barbeque and ketchup. The AB "a la bilbaína" I made today was fried potatoes, chicken, ketchup and a garlic-cream-mayonnaise sauce. Completely creepy, completely Halloween-appropriate and completely delicious.

"But what about Laudio," you are surely wondering. "What in the world are those crazy kids at IES Laudio BHI up to?" Well, this weekend being the turbo-American cultural event that is Halloween, my class activities this week were all related to the spooky holiday. By the end this meant kids playing Halloween Bingo, doing wordsearches and competing for Real American Candy Corn.

We also took the opportunity to practice some English pronunciation with Halloween words. Some of the students surprised me with their ability to mimic a southern drawl: I got quite a few Basque kids saying back to me, "VAYUM-pawr." I don't even say "VAYUM-pawr." Awesome.

Incidentally, none of these were the kid who came up to me before class with a flier from a CAROLINA MUDCATS GAME (the Mudcats are Raleigh's local baseball team, and I use the term "baseball team" loosely because they are terrible). And a target from a turkey shoot. I asked him, "are you kidding me??!?", but he was not. As it turns out, he stayed with a family in Raleigh, of all places, to improve his English. Go figure.

these kids put the "loud" in Laudio (if you pronounce it right).

My first day of "real" classes was yesterday, and for the most part it went really well. I had a food-related storytelling activity put together for them (fact: one of their stories started out, "Hello, I'm Lady Gaga" and concluded with a dissatisfied Lady Gaga marching into the kitchen - her salmon was raw - only to discover the chef was Barack Obama, whom she then, as the student put it, kicked "in the bottom"). The activity went really well in 90 of my approximately 92 classes (another fact: this number may be slightly exaggerated), but two of them were totally out of control.

When I was in high school, my favorite teacher, Ms. Greenwalt, had an amazing trick for students who were not paying attention in class. She would walk up to their desk and grin at them until they either looked up and got embarrassed or another student yelled at them to shut up/look up and they got embarrassed.

Yet another fact: this only works when less than 50% of the class is not paying attention. Ai ama.

However, as I said before, most of my classes were both manageable and fun and most of my students are awesome. In one of my classes I taught them the term "pork loin" (I swear, one of them is going to visit England and be SO HAPPY their teacher Kata taught them that one). Then they taught me the Basque for "pork loin." Actually, that is not true. None of us knew the Basque for "pork loin," so one of the girls looked it up in the dictionary and we all learned that too (see below).

Euskera of the Day:
Ai ama. "Good gravy" (rough translation). More like "madre mia."
Azpizun or (much funnier!) solomotxo. "Pork loin."

"shrimp and grits." "y'all." "Johnny Cash."

These were the important terms I wound up writing on the boards today in my various classes. As it turns out, you can take the girl out of the south, but then she gets approximately 700% more southern. I spoke to about 6 classes today and introduced myself, and when you're supposed to introduce yourself and your culture, it's hard not to become a bit of a cliche of your own region.

Other highlights:

One of my coworkers at the school is also new and she is super friendly and she invited me to her village and to go see an Athletic game with her (her brother is a socio and can hook us up with tickets). Awesome!

The student (a girl) who asked me, "do you like Basque boys?" This was in the most out-of-control of my classes and by far the most hilarious.

The class that got way more entertainment looking for all the Springfields on my US map than I would have ever dreamed possible.

The roller coaster of excitement and confusion that is Basque school. All the professors speak to each other almost exclusively in Euskera, which as it turns out is pretty intimidating. But then, I have short conversations with people and it feels like the biggest accomplishment ever. "Good morning," I say. "Good morning," they reply. Sometimes I say "Hi," and they say "Hello." Most impressively, yesterday I asked the lady at the front desk, "where is Esteban?" She told me in Spanish, but I still felt pretty good about it. I think I'm going to take it to the next level tomorrow and ask "where is Esteban, please?"

Anyway, next week I am planning to do music activities with my classes. My higher-level classes are all getting Johnny Cash day. A selection of the vocabulary I will be teaching them from "A Boy Named Sue": booze, ain't, honky-tonk, stud, cuss, saloon, gouging.


Euskera of the day:
Esteban non dago, mesedez? "Where is Esteban, please?"

I'm Alava that!

Thursday is a big day.

What happens on Thursday: I move into my apartment. I go back to Laudio (hence the fabulous pun in the title) and meet more people at my school and get my weekly schedule, which is hopefully something like tuesday-wednesday-thursday because that would be PERFECT for travel. And I'll probably buy my ticket for the Sevilla vacation shortly after that!!

Not much else to tell, Bilbao is still delightful and we lost horribly to Barcelona, which everyone expected.

One thing I had forgotten about and have yet to readjust to in Spain is how socially acceptable public displays of affection are. People just sit down and make out in public like it ain't no thing! It's pretty awkward so far.

I'll put up pictures once I'm reunited with my camera cord and the rest of my belongings that have already moved into my piso ahead of me.


Aaand reintroducing Euskera of the day:

Iraila September. This is the only month I know so far, so I'm set until Wednesday night.

hello, I work at the basquest school ever

Sooo last night I met up with two of the other people from my program, Elizabeth and Matt, who had just gotten in and we explored for a while then had a picnic! We met up again this morning and walked around, got lunch (side note: when selecting lunch meat at Carrefour, do not choose by which is the cheapest. You will get the ickiest ham substitute ever made.) and then I took a train to Laudio (Llodio if you want to google it, the Spanish name is better known) to go see my school!

First, let me tell you about my school. It is about 20 minutes from Bilbao, or 30 minutes including train ride/transit from my apartment door. It's pretty giant and includes junior high through high school students. I met up with Esteban, my program mentor, and he showed me around and gave me a million papers with things like school maps and schedules and I learned and promptly forgot about 20 Basque words. I go back on Oct. 1 for basically the same thing, but meeting more people and getting my weekly schedule. I'm so excited!! Also, my school has several small breaks for local festivals and THREE spring break weeks (one in March, two in April). Heck yes.

The town, from what I saw of it, was really little and nice. When I was in Madrid I mentioned to Antonio, my friends' landlord, that I was going to be teaching in Laudio and he is like "oh, there are lots of ETA terrorists there." I do not think I saw a single terrorist but on the other hand, they had "bring the Basque prisoners home" posters (which is normal) but they were around the official town hall (which I've never seen before). Also, I counted six (6!) Guardia Civil trucks. So I think pretty separatist is just how Laudio rolls.

Now I'm off to give Ismene (one of my soon-to-be roommates) my deposit for the room! Things are settling into place nicely now.