English Clase

On an introductory note, "class" is one of the several English words that living in Spanish has made me unable to spell. We filled out course evaluations in our CIEE classes this past week, and several minutes in, a voice broke the silence: "How do you spell 'difficult' - one 'f' or two?" We laughed, but it's a confusion I for one totally understand. In my private journal, I've given up on trying to limit myself to one language or the other. Sometimes I switch back and forth from sentence to sentence, and sometimes it will be completely one or the other with just one word different, often because I just can't think how to write it the other way. "Class", for example - my hand just seems to have lost the muscle memory to write the double 's'. I really have to concentrate. But I suppost that's really neither here nor there...

Because what I was really going to write about was the English class I taught this week. Context: I'm taking a class with CIEE called "Linguistics Applied to Teaching", which is basically a "how to teach a second language" theory class. The práctica, or practical application, part of the class required us to actually teach a second language class. And since we're in Spain, that meant teaching English. Our professor has a connection with a colegio in a neighborhood near the university. It's called Carmelitas, and is a private Catholic school for the equivalent of K-12 that has been around since 1907 - longer than the neighborhood that surrounds it. It's big by Alicante's standards - with somewhere around a thousand students, I think. We received a tour from Patxi (pronounced "Paht-chi" - it's Basque), the resident English teacher a few weeks ago, and this past week, I was the first of our class to venture there on my own to teach an hour-long conversation class to the Spanish equivalent of high-schoolers. Ahhh.

I went last Tuesday, sneaking out of my Literature and Film class an hour early to bus/walk to Carmelitas, where Patxi met me, and helped me set up the various bits of technology - powerpoint and youtube videos I'd prepared. We'd been given a theme to work with according to what day we'd signed up for, and mine had included Advertising, so I picked that up and ran with it, finding some funny TV commercials on youtube that I thought we could discuss, and then setting them up with a scattering of random objects with which to make their own short commercials.

These were the examples I gave them:






I had hoped that afterwards we could have a bitty discussion of the videos, as simple as "What were the differences?" or "What did you see?" but here I ran into a not wholly unexpected snag - namely, as everyone here informs me, a los españoles les cuesta mucho hablar inglés, which literally translated means "it costs Spaniards a lot to speak English". Even if they know vocabulary and grammer, the education here is only beginning to place an emphasis on interaction and communication. So I asked these kids a question, was assured that yes, they understood me, and then faced a room full of silence. Not that, my linguistics professor later pointed out, this is much different than other situations in other classes in any country you can name. The teacher asks a question, and the rooms falls silents. Ha pasado un ángel, Spaniards say. An angel passed by. This situation also related directly to my greatest anxiety about the situation, which was that I basically had no idea what their English capabilities looked like. "They're at about a level A2/B1," my linguistics professor told me. Yeah, I'm not sure what that looks like either. We got through it though - Patxi helped me out, and figuring them out a little bit more, I skipped a slide on the Powerpoint I now knew would be too complicated, and moved straight on to the activity.

The kids split up into groups of four and five, and each of them grabbed a little thing I had brought - my metal water bottle, a Luna bar, one of those dorky little tourist bags that is made to hold your passport and money and not be stolen... They worked on them for about ten minutes while I wandered, answering questions and watching them giggle and joke about what they could do. I had brought my camera, and Patxi played photographer, taking some photos of me in the classroom, and recording videos of the performances of each commercial to finish off the class.
(Note: The boy in the foreground whose face is totally obscured by the head of the boy in front of him? That's my host cousin. I'd only met him once, at my host sister's birthday party, and I didn't talk to him or even really see him that much and I also met a bazillion other family members, so I didn't recognize his face at all until I got home, and showed Ali my videos from the class. "That's my cousin!" she shrieked when I showed her their video, and her mother and father came running. We all agreed it was quite a coincidence.)

Here are the videos of their four commercials, in order of appearance:

1) The passport pouch:


2) The aluminum water bottle:


3) The Luna bar:


4) Aveeno body lotion:

Carnaval!!

Carnaval is an extended Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday plus the previous five days), a festival set purposefully right before Lent to give everyone a chance to blow off all kinds of sinful steam before the weeks of self-restraint and sacrifice that lead up to Easter. The big demonstrative festivals I've heard of go on in places like Venice, or Rio de Janiero, but Alicantinos take a good deal of pride in their particular brand of crazy that they brought out this past weekend.

Saturday night was the big night, but there were nighttime goings-on as early as Thursday night, and the festive lights that were strung up and down La Rambla, one of the main downtown streets, had been up for at least a week. My Carnaval started on Friday afternoon, when I walked the several blocks to my host sister's colegio//grade school to watch what I sort of assumed would be the various grades parading around the schoolyard in their costumes. I grossly underestimated. I mean, sure, I saw the local policemen standing around at the busy intersection near the school, but I was surprised when my madre informed me that they were there to shut down traffic for about four square blocks adjoining the school. This was a legit parade! There were easily hundreds of parents, grandparents and siblings gathered around the gate of the school, and from inside, the strains of a marching band playing "Bad Romance" were plainly audible.

The kids trooped out several minutes later, class by class, starting with the littlest (preschool) and on up to the oldest (about 6th grade). It quickly became obvious that the costumes had been orchestrated somewhat with the history of humanity (or at least, Western humanity) in mind, as you will see from the themes we watched march by, each accompanied by parents shouting names and waving cameras in attempts to catch a snapshot of their children's (more often than not bored) faces. The progression went as follows:

The wee cave(wo)men:

Egyptians:

Romans:

...followed by Greeks (not sure why they were in that order):

"The Modern Age," which embraced a spectrum from pirates to this spectacular representation of what I can only compare to French aristocracy circa Dumas/Marie Antoinette:

Then we jumped a few years to the twenties; flapper dresses and zoot suits:

And of course, let's not forget the hippies:

...who were charmingly mixed with my host sister's class (that's her, in the lilac dress), who represented, in a word, Grease:

Jump from mid- to late twentieth century with "los Hiphop":

...who were followed by the Goths, or as my madre says, "punquis":

This is where my pictures ended, because at this point we took off to keep up with my host sister as she and her gang rounded the parade route. However, I think that these groups were followed a scattering of astronauts, aliens, and non-descript futuristic weirdos wearing rainbow wigs. Also worth mentioning is the band, who, aside from playing "Bad Romance," marched between the ages playing more traditional tunes, and bouncing right along with an enthusiasm that frankly superceded that of many of the kids.


Continuation of my Carnaval: Saturday night. I donned my ridiculously expensive fairy wings and an equally ridiculous amount of green eyeshadow, and headed downtown with a friend. In my quiet neighborhood, we felt conspicuously costumed, but once we got to el centro, almost everyone was at the very least wearing a wig and/or a silly hat and/or garish sunglasses. The plan was to head to La Cantina, a cute little Mexican restaurant, for dinner and margaritas, but the place was packed, so we walked down a few blocks and opted for sangría and tapas instead. It ended up for the best, I think, because we sat outside on a main street, and so had a constant stream of entertaining costumes while we sat and chatted.

People here seem to go costume shopping in groups, so it's totally normal to see a gang of chickens, a gang of people dressed as Sims, a football team complete with cheerleaders, a group of Lady Gagas of multiple ages and genders, a team of superheroes, a legion of Roman warriors... you get the idea.

We left the restaurant (as it was closing shortly after midnight), and headed for La Rambla. Photos do a very poor job of expressing how completely full of people and energy this rather large street was. People were walking, dancing, drinking, smoking, yelling, talking, and generally having a jolly good time. There at least three big stages set up, each blaring a different live band covering pop music in both English and Spanish. We wandered around La Rambla and the surrounding area, went into a couple of clubs, and gained and lost members of our group. We ended up outside a churrería (a stand that sells churros - which, if you don't know, are fried sticks of dough optionally doused in sugar which, ideally you then dunk in chocolate. Culturally, they're sort of a cross between a donut and an elephant ear.) After that respite, we wandered on, now losing group members in larger chunks as sub-groups went off toward their beds or toward another bar to keep partying. My walking-home buddy and I decided we were about ready to call it quits at 3:30, but got side-tracked by a potty break the neat little Irish pub it landed us in. We got home around 5am, which we thought was totally respectable, even for Spain. My madre asked me the next morning what time I had gotten in, and when I told her, she looked slightly surprised. "So, pretty early," she said. "You know, I was expecting Ali (her fourteen-year-old) and her friends to be out until at least 2 or 3, but she was home by 1!" I think at this point, I have to just give up and admit that I will never have a Spanish body clock.






That said, I leave you with this: the prize for most... notable Carnaval costume goes to these gentlemen.