El Gafe has left the building

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Kyle

On 20th August 2008, Spanair flight 5022 crashed at Madrid Barajas killing all but 18 on-board. Luckily neither Tahlei nor I were on board. However, my flight had landed only hours before, so starting Spain’s run of terrible luck under the spell of The Gafe! Since then Spain has plunged into an economic recession, seen unemployment reach record highs of 20%!,(MISSING) had two of the coldest winters in living memory, and had their usually reliable football team lose unexpectedly to the USA in the Confederations Cup. Had Spanish Immigration Control been aware of things to come, they would never have let us in... Well, they shouldn’t have let us in anyway, as we’ve been sin papeles for 2 years.

In any case we were well prepared for the possibility of the papers question:
“Papeles?”
“No, ¡tijeras! ¿Gano yo?”

Living on the edge of legality, and with Spain suffering, we have still been able to have the time of our lives.

One of the things we’ll miss most is the food, with Australia sadly lacking quality jamón, tortilla, chorizo and cochinillo. Having said that, our food experience didn’t exactly get off on the right foot. During our first week in Madrid we intended to celebrate my birthday by going to a restaurant we’d found on our last trip to Madrid. We’d been waiting years to finally go back and have their pork ribs - costillas - again. Unfortunately our vocabulary didn’t extend to all of the pork cuts, so Tahlei, not wanting to resort to English, simply pointed to her midsection and said - “I want this”. When the meal came out it was immediately apparent that there was a severe breakdown in communication; this didn’t look anything like ribs. Still in our first week “we’ll try anything” stage, we tucked in. Soon after the first slimy piece of tripe slithered down our throats, we quickly decided to never intentionally, or accidentally, order callos again.

After mastering the art of ordering food, our next challenge was to find a place to live. Running out of time and money we took the first place that seemed half decent. In hindsight it wasn’t even half decent. We shared with 8 other naive souls. This sounds bad enough. However, combine this with only 2 bathrooms, a kitchen the size of an average pantry and equipped for only 4 compañeros de piso, as well as a flatmate who cooked and washed his clothes at 2am, it’s no wonder we were looking for a new place to live within 2 months.

We succeeded in finding a new place in one of our favourite barrios, Tirso de Molina. It had a huge terraza, bbq, cool loft-style bedroom, and a funky pink and black bathroom. It seemed like a sweet deal, and we definitely had some great bbq’s on that terrace. The only problem was that the dueño was a complete conman. He consistently lied to us and we heard rumours that he wasn’t even the real dueño, but was only sub-letting the place to us and hadn’t paid rent to the real owner for 9 months. Luckily we didn´t have any major problems and we moved out just before summer 2009.

Coming back for a second year everything was easier than the first time around. We were a little less guiri and a little more madrileño. Having contacts made a huge difference. Just before leaving for our summer holidays in 2009, we were having dinner with the family of some students and recounting all of the horror stories and bad experiences we’d collected from renting in Madrid. We mentioned that ideally we wanted to live near metro Bilbao, to which Ana replied “my mum has a house in Bilbao!”, and the rest is history. It´s so nice to rent from people you can trust, and probably vice versa too. They trusted us so much that they gave us the keys without even taking any money from us. Over the year this house has seen lots of parties and dinners and I’m sure that if these walls could talk they’d have plenty of stories to tell. It´s such a nice place that some friends are going to take over from us when we leave.

While it seems we have changed pisos more often than Zapatero has made poor decisions, I’ve been able to pretty much keep the same students for 2 years. This has definitely kept me on my toes as I’ve had to continuously plan new lessons and come up with ideas to keep the class fun and interesting (whether or not I succeeded is up to my students I guess - note the possibility to leave comments at the end of the blog!). Tahlei had the luxury of changing students quite often which meant she could recycle lesson plans and didn’t have to wade through all the news sites on the net looking for suitable discussion topics every Sunday night. It may have been more work for me, but seeing the same faces week in week out meant that I was able to become very good friends with my students. As bad as it sounds, some of my most cherished memories will be the hilarious mistakes and mispronunciations that my students came up with. My favourite was “Kyle you are very long”, to which I replied “why thankyou Ana, but I think you mean tall”.

As much as I endeavoured to make the classes fun, I also tried my best to pass on some of my knowledge of this most difficult language of ours. Many of my students have progressed to the point where we can have quite in-depth discussions about a range of topics, and most are now even able to understand my sense of humour! Sometimes I thought that our classes were more like therapy sessions than English lessons - however I was earning a hell of a lot less than therapists do. Maybe this is my calling in life...

One thing I’ve noticed about my students is that the vast majority are ladies. Is this a coincidence? Well, my boss told Tahlei that I’m very good with the ladies. I’m not sure exactly what he meant by this, but for some reason I feel oddly proud.

We’ve been lucky enough to make some great friends here, who we can hopefully keep in touch with down the track. My Friday footy mates were always good for a few laughs at El Diario after the game. There is something absurd about doing 1 hour exercise on a Friday afternoon, and then stumbling home in a drunken daze at 6am on Saturday. Tahlei also had her intercambio friends and classmates from French lessons (yes, she decided to learn French in Spain... go figure).

I’m told Madrid has the highest number of bars per capita in Europe. I can’t remember walking down a single street in Madrid without seeing a bar, or a chino selling litros and box wine. In Sydney it always seemed like such a mission to go out in town, but here you can just throw on some clothes, call a few friends and head out to any number of bars scattered around the city.

Our favourite places to go out are La Latina and Malasaña where you can walk 100metres and take your pick from 10 different places - however all selling the same beer... Mahou. I think there are two different kinds of people in the world, people who like Mahou and people who like Cruzcampo. I think it’s much like the Tooheys New versus VB debate in Australia. I’m definitely a Cruzcampo man myself. No matter what beer you get here, you can expect that half of it will be espuma; this took some getting used to. In Australia if a bartender poured me a beer with half of it head, I’d have poured it over his head. Having said that, if he poured me a beer in a glass the size of a thimble I wouldn’t have been to impressed either, but the whole caña thing is growing on me now. It does look like a ladies beer, but the more of them you order, the more tapas you get! Before arriving in Spain Tahlei wasn’t a beer drinker, but the teeny weeny glasses and the social acceptance of the caña con limón helped her transition into a fully fledged pint drinker that her mum can be proud of.

On weekends that we weren’t hitting the Madrid night spots, we were making our students jealous by jetting off to various European (and African) destinations. We visited 16 different countries, 2 principalities and almost all Spanish provinces. All of this now means we are intimately acquainted with Madrid Barajas Terminal 1, the low cost airline terminal.

Finally we will get to go to Terminal 4 on Wednesday, when we say goodbye to Madrid and to Spain and begin our new adventure in South America.

Please subscribe to the blog so you can receive an email each time we update it. We´ll try to write a new one each week. Please also leave comments because this will put smiles on our faces while we live the hard life of holidaying for over 5 months.

Hasta luego Madrid, we hope to see you again real soon! We will miss you!

Kyle and Tahlei
xox

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Photos

Snow!
Yes, it was a cold winter

Summer barbecues
The Tirso de Molina terrace

Cochinillo
Cooked half a piglet for Reyes Magos

Paella
At our favourite paella restaurant

Tinto de Verano
World´s greatest beverage

Comments

[kate]

hi Kyle, I can't be proud of Tahlei for drinking beer as I never touch the stuff, she will have to come home from south america a wine drinker!