February in Spain - our second month of ex-pat living

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I sit here writing this in the hazy sunshine with cup of milky tea in hand (I am still British after all) and enjoying the peace and tranquillity of a Sunday siesta in Spain. Lesson plans can wait until manana, best make the most of this weather…

It’s easy to paint a perfect picture of our new life here in Spain, but the truth is I’m quite glad to see the back of February. Okay, so we’ve been lucky enough to have found someone daft enough to employ us as teachers (even more so because there are two of us and not just one) and we’ve managed to forge some sort of semi-normal routine, but it’s been a slow process. It’s not been helped by the fact today is one of the very few days this month that we’ve been graced with the presence of the sun. Greg and I were talking the other day about how France has apparently had a terrible ski season so far as the snow conditions have been really rubbish. Apparently this is a phenomenon that occurs approximately once every 6 years, and I think Spain has fallen victim to the same problem. Honestly, the weather has been crazy this month, especially by Spanish standards. In Playa Flamenca we’ve had rain, clouds and plenty of wind, whilst other parts of the country have been subject to blizzards, floods and even metres of snow (in fact, Rojales which is only 15 minutes away from us had snow a few weeks ago). Living next to the beach kind of loses its shine when its so cold outside (although it’s still better than a walk along Burntisland seafront at any time of the year- sorry Sheila and Brian). Anyway, I don’t want to be classified as a typical Brit only talking about the weather, so I’ll move on to our next piece of news- jobs!

It’s always a gamble moving to a new country and starting a new life- you never quite know what will happen and whether you will find a job, a house, friends… We’ve been relatively lucky up until now when we’ve moved abroad but this is a whole new ball game and we are not just looking for seasonal work or jobs in the tourism sector which tend to be more readily available. This time we’re looking for…. DUM, DUM, DUM… ‘proper’ jobs (shock, horror) like most normal people. So, after constantly driving back and forth between Cartagena and Alicante with a few trips to Murcia thrown in for good measure, we managed to find a school that was looking for teachers, and was willing to take on the two of us as a package. In fact after the first few weeks of nothing, the inevitable happened and we were offered interviews at two different schools on the same day: one based in Alicante and one based in Cartagena. Up until now we were torn between which city to live in, and it knew our final decision would be heavily based on where we were offered work. In the end, Alicante won.

We were already leaning slightly more towards Alicante as it’s an area we know slightly better than Cartagena, and well, the manager of the school in Cartagena also seemed a bit mental. Not in a loopy kind of way but just in a scatterbrain, ‘never let anyone get a word in edgewise and then answer your own questions’ kind of way. Plus it was mainly teaching 5 – 8 year olds and images of China flash before our eyes making us shiver. Well, it’s not that bad but we want to increase our repertoire and actually be able to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t cry when you ask them a question (or stare at you blankly when you ask them what their name is). So Alicante it is. It’s actually two schools that we are working between and they cater for a wide age range of students from age 5 (thankfully not our classes) all the way up to adults. After I accidently told the boss Greg was a somewhat expert in teaching business English, he has been given a number of one to one business classes along with a few adult group classes. I on the other hand am teaching a group of 12 -14 year olds for 1 hour every day (yay, not). I don’t really mind that much and actually they are really nice kids, but like teaching any group of teenagers going through puberty, there are times when you feel you are babysitting/peace-keeping rather than teaching. I also have a few one to one’s including a twice weekly session with a military general! It’s been a bit of a baptism of fire getting back into teaching, especially as Spanish people have a much better grasp of grammar terms and a good foundation of English to start with (whipping out flashcards with pictures of fruit and animals on them ain’t gonna cut it I’m afraid). Last week I was teaching my students about adjectives and I began to tell them about synonyms (a word which has the same or very similar meaning to another word) and before I had even finished my sentence, they started rhyming off several examples. I did manage to teach them some words they didn’t know, including ‘stingy’. I asked one of my students as he was leaving “Alberto, what does stingy mean again?” and without missing a beat he turned and said “Scottish people”.

In between teaching, we’ve been spending most of our spare time hunting for a flat in Alicante, as the drive from Playa Flamenca every day has been tiring to say the least. I think I could probably do the journey with my eyes closed now and we know every landmark along the way which helps us identify how long we have been driving and how much further we have to go. In fact, why don’t I take you along on this wonderful journey so you can experience the fun for yourself? In you get, and don’t forget your seatbelt!

Once we’ve navigated our way out of the retirement village, our first point of call is the Punta Prima roundabout next to McDonalds, where every day and night you can call upon the services of our favourite lady of the night “La Osa” (or "the bear" in English if you’d prefer). Sometimes she even wears her gold sparkly jeans or treats us to a little dance as we drive by, which lightens the mood somewhat. Further on, we pass a half-finished housing estate situated between Torrevieja and Santa Pola – a sure victim of the 2007/2008 housing crash. It reminds us of the episode on TV programme Benidrom when the dodgy estate agent tries to sham a customer into buying an unfurnished set of houses when he doesn’t even own the land in the first place. He tricks the customer into paying a 5,000 euros deposit and then celebrates with his partner in crime by promising her “chips and rice tonight babe, we shall be eating chips AND rice”. So every time we drive by this area we refer to it as the chips and rice estate (well, you’ve got to amuse yourself somehow).

Next along our journey is the Santa Pola theme park, which looks more like a rubbish dump than a theme park, followed closely by the Santa Pola lighthouse turn off. This is where we inevitably lose radio reception for a few minutes – particularly annoying when a good song like Bon Jovi comes on to sunshine FM.

Before long we approach our next landmark, the second lady of the night who we have somehow named “Peggy-Marie”. She is a younger, thinner and slightly more attractive version of La Osa, and can be found at the side of a roundabout just outside of the Urba Nova urbanisation. A few minutes later we reach the outskirts of Alicante city centre, and this is where our mate “Big Davey” likes to sit in his wheelchair and ponder every afternoon underneath a bridge. Finally, we reach the promenade which has it’s clusters of tourists wandering around in their shorts and t-shirts, and the barrage of looky-looky men with their display of sunglasses and sunvisors on the floor. And that’s our car journey every day. The sooner we get a flat in Alicante the better.

We’ve been spending the rest of our time by creating our own little routine (we hate to admit that it’s actually quite nice to have a normal, regular pattern of events. For Greg, this consists of playing football with a local Spanish team whilst I indulge myself with a bath without the fear of someone chapping the door and asking how long I’ll be. Weekends consist of cleaning the house and doing the shopping (so THIS is normality?) and we usually play tennis on a Sunday, weather permitting. We’ve also found a random TV channel that has started playing Taggart episodes every night right from the very beginning of the first series. So that’s our evenings sorted….

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Photos

Crazy weather = beautiful rainbow.
where's the pot of gold?