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.

que será, será

The question on every language assistant's mind, starting in November: am I staying here next year?

OK, not every language assistant. Some are definitely going home because their contracts are nonrenewable; others are definitely staying because they're in love with a Spaniard and/or this has become more their home than their home back home. If you know what I mean there. But the choice was definitely on my mind.

Time off, a visit back home to Raleigh and settling back into my routine made the decision easy for me.

I'm moving home next year.

Actually, to be honest, the decision was pretty much made before Christmas break. So why, you ask, am I leaving this 22-hour-a-work-week-living-in-Europe gig to go back to America, where food is processed, the work week is 40 hours, and none of those hours get cancelled because of a strike?

Well... lots of reasons. Life in Europe is still life, first of all. Yes, Bilbao is still awesome; yes, I still love it here. But when you live somewhere, it's not like you are a constant tourist; you are settling in, going to your job, coming home, cooking dinner, watching TV or reading, going to bed. Also, I have discovered that I don't terribly like teaching. Go figure. The kids are still entertaining sometimes and I have another job at an academy in the afternoons, both of which are fine jobs. I just don't dig teaching all that much.

But the main reason is this: I have the strongest desire to nest EVER. This has been the case almost since I got here. In the past 5 years, I haven't ever spent more than 1.5 years at a time living in the same place. I feel myself reaching the end of that stage. I want a dog and some kitchen appliances. I'd like to see my family more than once every few months. And, maybe most importantly, when I went home for Christmas I felt like I belonged. Spending some time away from Raleigh has taught me to appreciate that.

So... what next?

Well... I'll spend the next few months taking advantage of my time and opportunities here. Taste foods I've always wanted to try. Travel around as much as possible. Get to know Basque Country as well as I possibly can in 5 months. In June, if all goes according to plan, I'm hiking the Camino de Santiago. Check that one off the bucket list!

When I move home, I'd like to start pursuing photography. I don't know if this needs to entail an internship, apprenticeship, going back to school, or just starting and seeing what happens, but I'm going to find out. Any professional photographers who read this, feel free to leave tips!

And of course get a dog and a KitchenAid.

Beyond that... who knows?

so much to be thankful for.

Julieta Venegas from the front row.

This week has been crazy hectic but also unbelievably blessed. Here's the rundown:

Monday: Javi, the actual teacher of my "clase mala," stayed in class with me after having a come-to-Jesus last week with the kids about how rude they were being. They behaved awesomely.

Tuesday: interviewed for and got a job in Zornotza/Amorebieta, a town about 25 minutes away. 4 nights a week and more than doubles my income.

Wednesday: Julieta Venegas, one of my very all-time favorite singers, came to Bilbao and did a concert. My friend Jessica and I got there half an hour early; apparently half an hour is all you need to get perfect front-row spots. The above picture was taken on my LITTLE camera with no digital zoom. Besides being only 5 feet away, Julieta was of course amazing. Incredibly sweet, funny, she played at least 4 instruments, and it was her birthday!! Easily best concert of my life.

Thursday: Thanksgiving! I found sweet potatoes (a certain moroccan store gets a big "eskerrik asko" for that one). Cooked them the way my dad always did them, the way I prefer them, which I'll tell you here:

Rinse potatoes. Poke holes in potatoes with fork. Bake in 350-400F (a little under 200C) oven for 40-50 minutes.

Eat. Don't you dare leave the skins, they're caramelized and wonderful!

Yesterday I also started my new job and both of my classes (one of 10-year-old girls, one of adults) were really nice. Then last night was Thanksgiving Round One: Basque Edition. I went with my roommates to a friend's house (actually, the house of Sara, the girl who used to live in my room) for a Thanksgiving dinner party and it. was. awesome. They played (American) Christmas music, made nachos and a "baby turkey" (i.e. large chicken, which I have to say was tender and juicy beyond belief). We each gave thanks for something at the end of the meal, and it was so funny because as the only American I suddenly became the Thanksgiving expert. "Kata, are you allowed to give thanks before the dinner?" "Kata, do you ask for something too, or just give thanks?"



But of course there aren't really any Thanksgiving rules except that you must eat too much, which we dutifully did.

Now I'm gearing up for Thanksgiving Round Two: American Edition on Saturday.

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."

thank you, anthony bourdain

Just a couple thoughts now that the week (the work week for me, anyway) is over:

I am so glad I get to teach real lessons next week. Talking about myself for half an hour 12 times is, as it turns out, super awkward. I showed them pictures of my family, southern food, Michael Jordan and a Pepsi logo (hey, there's not a lot of internationally recognizable NC stuff out there). Also, watch out, stepsisters, because I think several dozen teenage Basque boys might be in love with you.

I just made what was easily my best pasta ever. Anthony Bourdain's cooking techniques special is incredibly useful and I can't recommend it highly enough. Dropping some starchy pasta water in with the sauce and your almost-fully cooked spaghetti: who would have imagined it was so good?

And I am going to Donostia this weekend.

puente, say whaaaat?

This week after my first day of classes on Monday we have had reception/orientation stuff put on by the Basque government. Yesterday I rode with Esteban, my co-worker/program mentor, to a reception in Vitoria-Gasteiz. This consisted mostly of sitting and listening to some welcome speeches by, as Esteban put it, "big fish" of the Basque education department. Afterwards they provided pintxos, wine, soft drinks and dessert and we all mingled for a little while.

I had a super-exciting moment at school yesterday when we were getting ready to go, though. I was getting ready to meet up with Esteban to head out and I met the vice-principal of the school, and she turns to someone else and goes (in Basque) "he's over there." And I understood it!!! Get ready, complicated agglutinating language isolate, because I am SO going to learn you.

Then today was part 1 of training in Barakaldo, a suberb/satellite city in the Bilbao metro area. Some of it was incredibly helpful (concrete ideas of activities, how to plan classes/adapt material to the classes' levels, etc) and some of it was incredibly NOT (I'm looking at you, 1-hour segment on how to record people using a microphone and your computer and then post it online). A bunch of us (auxiliares) then went to IKEA, and I think I now have everything I need to settle in to my apartment.

The most exciting thing I learned today, though, was that we have a puente this weekend! For those of you not familiar with Spanish culture, a puente is when a national holiday falls on a day one day away from a weekend (i.e., Tuesday) and they make a "bridge" out of it by taking the day off in between too. In this case, the holiday is Columbus Day, which is also the Fiesta Nacional/Día de la Hispanidad (Day of Spanishness), which as you can imagine doesn't always go over so great in Basque Country. The important thing for me is this means I have Astelehena (Monday) AND Asteartea (Tuesday) off work!! Days off DO always go over great with me. Anyway, I may go to Donosti (yes, AGAIN, I know, I know!) and stay with a new friend there for a couple days.

One thing I've noticed is we (auxiliares) hang out in HUGE groups. This isn't necessarily a problem, except that we'll go into a pintxos bar and completely take it over. This makes me feel a little obnoxious, even though we're all good patrons and buy snacks and drinks and are not too loud and everything.

On the one hand, I wonder if now is time for me to be going out and making local friends (join a sports team! take dance lessons! something!). On the other, I remember that when moving to another country there's usually an adjustment period where you're just settling in and you tend to spend a heavier chunk of time with other people in your situation (i.e., expats). Plus, I genuinely like a lot of my fellow auxiliares a lot! Not to mention that I always find study-abroad or program people who won't be friends with their fellow countrymen at all because they're "trying to go local" a little snotty; I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. I guess my plan for now is to keep hanging out with my new friends but make sure I make an effort with my church and my roommates (I think we're all going to some open-house event at Mango this Thursday).

"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?"

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.