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Published: September 15th 2009
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arriving in Guardo
view of the mountains as you approach Guardo from the south (coming from Palencia) Dear family and friends,
I've now been in Guardo, Spain for about a week and a half and it's definitely time for an update! After a marathon of a journey from Washington to London to Madrid and then on to Palencia and Guardo via train and bus I arrived in Guardo on Friday morning, September 4th. I stayed in a hotel on the edge of town for 4 nights while I searched for an apartment. This was pretty much the only accommodation option in the town as all the hostels have closed but it ended up being really nice there and there was good internet in my room so it was all worth it. There were several young and friendly people working at the hotel which provided nice company. During my first few days in Guardo I walked all around the town and saw quite a bit. Guardo is located in a valley immediately adjacent to the Montaña Palentina mountain range in northern Spain. The elevation here is about 3,300 ft and from certain areas in the town (like near the tourism office) there are particularly good views of the mountains and I find them very impressive. There is a
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view of mtns from near the river small river that runs through Guardo as well which I think is really attractive and there are nice paths along both sides of the river in some places that I´ve found to be great places to walk and go for runs. There is also an attractive park by the river at one point near a foot bridge. The people here are all very friendly for the most part and as to be expected for a small town of 7,500 people, everyone seems to know everyone.
My goal was to find a 4 bedroom apartment because there are 4 of us "North American language and culture assistants" placed at schools in Guardo and we decided to live together. After making numerous phone calls and seeing 3 pisos (apartments), I finally visited a very centrally located apartment with 4 bedrooms and lots of exterior rooms that I really liked so I signed the contract on Monday night and moved in on Tuesday morning. It was a relief to finally move in somewhere and not have to pay to stay at the hotel anymore!
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday unpacking, buying things for the piso and running other errands. The other
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view of the mtns from the railroad overpass language assistants that I would be living with weren't going to start arriving in Guardo until Friday afternoon so I decided to head to Palencia on Thursday morning. Palencia is the capital of the province where Guardo is located and I needed to go there to apply for a foreign residence card in order to get paid for my teaching job in the high school in Guardo. I thought I'd stay a night in Palencia in order to see more of the city before returning to Guardo. I successfully completed the paperwork for the ID card and walked all around the center of the city on Thursday. There are a lot of pretty churches in Palencia and I took a tour of the cathedral before eating lunch in the plaza mayor. I also walked all around the huge park by the river in the afternoon and decided to take advantage of the fact that Palencia has a movie theater while Guardo does not. That night I saw "He's Just Not that Into You" dubbed in Spanish which was pretty funny.
I got back to Guardo on Friday afternoon a few hours before Dan (one of my compañeros de piso)
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view of mtns from the railroad overpass arrived with his father. They had been traveling around Castilla y Leon via rental car for a week. Mariana (another compañera de piso) arrived a few hours later and we went out to a bar for drinks and snacks that night. It was really great to finally have company in Guardo aside from the few people I had met in the past week. On Saturday afternoon we took advantage of the fact that Dan´s father had the rental car and we decided to take a drive north of Guardo through the mountains and explore the area a bit. We left around 5:30pm and the late afternoon/evening sun was pretty spectacular hitting the mountains as we drove. It was a really great drive and we got back just before nightfall. Dan's father left Guardo on Sunday morning and the 3 of us, Dan, Mariana and I, walked around Guardo and didn't do too much the rest of the day. Yesterday the 3 of us searched for a TV for our apartment because it unfortunately didn't come with one. None of the TV stores in Guardo had older TVs for reasonable prices so we took a taxi to the town dump (haha
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train carrying coal to the coal plant north of Guardo yep, believe it or not!) where we heard a lot of TVs get delivered to be recycled (some of them still working just fine). The guy there told us that he had had 40 crates of old TVs but that on Friday they had been sent away so he had nothing to offer us. We left him my cell number in case a working TV was delivered in the next week or two but it turned out not to matter because when we got back in the taxi, the driver told us he knew a guy who liked repairing things and might have an old TV. It turned out he did and we were able to buy a fairly large older TV from him that he didn't want anymore for only 50 euros!!! It was a pretty awesome steal. We set it up in our piso immediately when we returned and it works just fine. We will be getting cable and internet for our apartment in the next week too so things are going pretty well!
Last night our 4th campañera de piso (Sofia) arrived and today was our first day of "work" in our schools. Two of us
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hill in Guardo where an old church is located are working at each Instituto de Educacion Secundaria (high school) in Guardo. Dan and I are working at IES Claudio Prieto, a 5 minute walk from our apartment while Sofia and Mariana are working at IES Senorio del Guardo about a 15 minute walk away (on the other side of the river). Dan and I met the profesoras in the English Dept. at our school and also the two Jefes de Estudios (principals). Everyone was really welcoming. We decided that aside from helping out in English classes, Dan will assist the teacher in the Math and Technology classes and I will assist the teacher in the Geography and History classes. These 4 classes are part of the bilingual program in our school. They haven't made our schedule yet but informed us that we would probably only be working in the school Tuesday-Thursday which is really great because they know we'll want to be traveling a lot. It's best that we only have to work in the high school 3 days a week anyway because we are only expected to be working there about 12 hours a week and 12 hours of work spread over 4 or 5 days would be
kind of silly. We walked around the school a bit with the teachers and then left around 11:30. We were only there for about an hour today but hopefully they'll have our schedules set soon so we can start working there. I'm a little nervous about starting to work but also excited. I think it's going to be a good year!
I will place pictures from my trip to Palencia in a separate post. I hope you are all doing well!
Besos de España!
Dana :-)
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tio buck
non-member comment
Guardo and environs
Hi, Dana! Thanks for the fotos and commentary. It sounds as if you have got everything properly organized and Guardo looks really nice. We look forward to reading your future commentary on your adventures there! Tio Buck