The curious reader may have wondered what I have been doing with myself as of late aside from my duties as an auxiliar. I haven’t been traveling aside from the Fulbright Conference in Pamplona. Instead I’ve been spending my afternoons in the suburbs, specifically Boadilla and Villaviciosa, teaching clases particulares (after-school tutoring). In all, I’m teaching seventeen children four afternoons a week. A typical week goes:
Monday: one hour with four nine year old girls preparing for the Cambridge Flyers exam
Tuesday: one hour with a girl preparing for the Cambridge Preliminary English Test
Wednesday: one hour with four eight year olds reading stories, drawing pictures and playing games
one hour with four six year olds and pictures, games and songs while avoiding the kids' sneezes
another hour with the Cambridge Flyers girls
Friday: one hour with three four year olds singing and drawing
A bit much, you ask? Maybe, but I’ve enjoyed spending extra time outside of the city, especially now that it’s feeling springy. Boadilla and Villaviciosa have some lovely parks, though if I want wireless between school and tutoring, it means hanging out in McDonalds for awhile. On Wednesdays, the longest day, one of the mothers, the Spanish teacher at my school, has been inviting me to lunch beforehand, which is sweet of her. Though our topics of conversation sometimes seem just shy of attacks on US cultural norms (automatic transmissions, air conditioning and Gossip Girl), whose Spanish counterpoints I don’t feel like bringing up (the inconvenience of clotheslines as opposed to dryers, the denial that it actually gets cold during Spanish winters as demonstrated by the lack of heating and any Spanish talk show), it’s nice to spend time with people who have lives more stable than my own and those of my friends.
Staying in Madrid to tutor has also allowed me to save some extra money for my gran viaje during Semana Santa (Holy Week/Spring Break), which begins Friday morning with a flight to Lisbon where I will find Alex, my horse-riding friend of fifteen years or so. We haven’t seen each other in a year, which makes me extra excited for the week we get to spend together. We’ll be in Lisbon until Sunday when we’ll catch a bus down to the Algarve to spend the rest of our trip on horseback. Monday we’ll be setting off through cork forests, almond and olive trees just coming into bloom with a picnic lunch before arriving on the outskirts of a fishing village along the coast. Tuesday we’ll ride along open cliff tops with a gallop along the beach. Wednesday we’ll cross sand dunes, hills and valleys known for sweet potato crops and the remains of a Moorish 10th century castle. Finally, Thursday we will return for a BBQ at the ranch before I set off on the next leg of my journey.
I hadn’t planned this last bit of the trip before getting to Spain; in fact, I hadn’t considered returning to the US at any point during my grant. That has changed (and if you’ve looked at the cost of international flights lately, you’ll understand why I’ve taken on all of the extra tutoring hours). I’ll be in Boston for Easter. If you’re family and reading this, I’m sure you’re asking: Why not Michigan? After all, Easter for us means everyone -- Mom’s side, Dad’s side, neighbors, families from church -- all at my parents’. I’ll miss you all. Boston, though, is where Trevor is with the extended family I haven’t met (though he’s been to one of my family’s Christmas parties and a 4th of July gathering) and his school friends and life (while he’s met all of my friends in Michigan and the majority in Madrid). Despite the amount of time that has passed since we began dating, we’ve spent 1/3 of that time in different countries and slightly less than that fraction in the US but in separate states. It’s my turn to travel, so I’ll be taking off from Portugal for London’s Gatwick where I’ll have to catch a bus to Heathrow (luckily I’ve got an 11 hour layover -- plenty of time for the 3 hour bus ride) to fly into Boston by Friday afternoon. A week there, and it will be back to Madrid for a mere nine weeks with plans to do a bit more traveling before returning to the US.
Though it’s completely the wrong season for this poem, as I take off, I have the last couple lines of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” stuck in my head: “But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep.” These next two weeks are exactly what I’ve been waiting for. Stories and fotos when I get back to España!
I feel I should provide my own explanation for Emily's trip to Boston.
ReplyDeleteWith the conclusion of my undergraduate studies, I began to consider what will need wrapping up in my life on the East Coast. It's a daunting list - I grew up around New England, after all. Many things can be taken care of later in life on the many trips I will surely be taking (one, for example, is to volunteer for Boston's own 4th of July celebration, which is a tradition my father held for 27 years), yet there was one item in particular that couldn't wait. Emily had to meet the friends she'd heard so much about over the four semesters since we met.
Many of these friends I intend to stay in touch with throughout my life. They're all here, together, right now; yet in just three weeks from the time I post this, they won't be. They'll be returning to New Hampshire, Virginia, Tennessee, California, Italy, Bangladesh, et cetera. This is my own most important reason for asking her to make the trip (other than for breaking up long periods of absence, of course). When I realized that this was our last chance, Emily and I began making plans.
We were very fortunate that IES Máximo Trueba placed their spring vacation before the weekend of Easter so she could come and meet my father's side of the family. I hope that all this doesn't come across as an excuse for me to hoard Em for myself, though I do regret asking her to miss her most crucial family gathering in light of recent losses. She'll have a lot of faces to associate with the names she's been hearing over the past 21 months (more than 3 dozen, including my extended family, but who's counting?). We'll be making the most of it, I'm sure.