King Eternal

Hello you. How the devil are you? Everything is quiet here. We don't get paid until a week today and money is tight so all the new teachers are scrimping and saving. We have have been trying to find things to do for cheap/free. The best way of doing this is to getting yourself a map and find the nearest big bit of blue and head there forth with, as nothing says fun like a lake.

Our nearest lake is in the fine town of Aoiz, the name is more unpronounceable than it first appears. It was lovely though eerily quiet which gave it a slight post-apocalyptic feel. The initial plan was to walk around the lake for out door activity, conversation and famous five-esque japes. However, while walking along a track a white land rover flew around the corner and politely informed us that we weren't allowed down here. My initial reaction to such confrontational and flagrant abuse of power is to go out shooting but we decided to meekly say yes sir and turn around. When he had left we turned the encounter into a brush with lake fascists. Fuck the police, y'all.

That was last Sunday, this weekend I've spent the weekend being cooked for. If you are struggling to think of something to do this weekend I would throughly recommend it. Dan made some beautiful canaloni while the rest of us helped him by sitting in the living room discussing such important matters as which song has the best intro (Gimme shelter by the Rolling Stones, obviously) and who would win in a fight between Bruce Lee and Mohammad Ali. Sunday was a lovely day in front of the football while Katharyn roasted a chicken. Marc had a horrendous footballing day, his Korean (he did live in Korea) team lost and thus missed the playoffs, Man Utd lost and Osasuna were denied by a last minute equalizer. Once we get paid we are planning a bit of a blow out.

I've also had to lay down some good old fashioned discipline. I've learned that slamming a door or threatening to phone call parents will reduce a child to doing your class recycling in a desperate bid to appease you. My teenagers can be a handful. Though my knowledge of Spanish swear words is increasing thanks to them. One told me he could swear in English, wrongly, I asked to hear them, they were very mild, crap and piss and he even included silly. I laughed and turned just to hear him shout "oh and CUNT!"

It transpires that Halloween is actually fairly important in Spain. My Spanish teacher has demanded our presence in costume on Saturday. I have no idea what to go as, so if any of you (not you Alex) has any ideas please let me know.

It's all pretty quiet. I am currently compiling a mammoth post on nationalism, so thats something to look forward to! Nationalism here can be awkward, I had a lesson on politics today and it was just a case of letting the Spanish and the Basques argue before just letting myself out after an hour and a half. Once I have my own mind sorted I'll subject you to my bout of naval gazing.

But I will lay down some Spanish on ya. My Spanish is still pretty basic and involves a lot of pictures, like so:

As you have made out through my artistic ability I have been trying to get body parts down. A few are:

Pelo: Hair
Ojo: Eye
Mano: Hand
Brazo: Arm
Cabeza: Head

I'm pretty good with adjectives:
Gordo - Fat
Delgado - Thin
Guapo/a - Beautiful (o for men , a for women)
Feo/a - Ugly
Estupido- Stupid
Gracioso - Funny
Fuerte - Strong
Debil - Weak
Rapido - Fast
Despacio - Slow

To describe people you need:

Soy ______ - I am ________
Tu eres ________ - You are _________
El/Ella es _________ - He/ She is _________
Nosotros somos ________ - We are ________
Vosotros sois ________ - You (plural) are _______
Ellos son - They are ________

So there you go you can describe people in Spanish! Congratulations, you know as much as I do. As you can see I don't stop teaching when I clock out, I just care too much.

Tu eres guapo/a - You are beautiful, go on, go and make someones day.

A few other choice words you need to know are:
Hijo de puda: Son of a whore - the worst thing you can say
Leggings: Leggings
Verde: Smutty
Juego de la pulga: Tiddly Winks

My Spanish isn't very good or functional but it's getting better, it's better than my Romanian got due to my shameful laziness. Knowledge is the bomb.

love love love x

A Postcard of a Painting

Shiny, shiny, shiny new home wifi connection. No more trooping to the internet cafe. As I left the internet cafe for the last time the African lady who owns it gave me a handful of jelly babies. Without words she knew it was our last meeting, the last time our eyes would meet over the chewing gum stand.

These are the small and winding streets of the old town. Easily my favourite part of the city. This is during siesta hours which is why its deserted. There 's lots of bars and cafes and wandering the streets especially in the evening is always worth it. In the evening unlike the Britain the streets are actually at their busiest as Spaniards like to do everything later, something which with my body clock think is the best idea since this: www.weirdthings.org.uk/hands-free-urinal-this-is-wrong-in-so-many-ways/

This is from the Japanese garden. No I don't know why they have one either, but they do, and its a better place for it.

This dark looking street is a perfectly normal shopping street except for the two weeks of the year when they let bulls tear arse up it stampeding and gorging as they go. Its strange walking down thinking that somewhere along here people have died. If you are so inclined you can youtube it, it's really not a nice way to go.

This is the view from the walls. It's hard to make out where the city ends and the hills/ridge/whatever begin. What you can see is that Pamplona is small, roughly Norwich size but with less kebab shops and more outrageous hand gestures.

So theres just a few pictures to show you a little glimpse of the place. I hope I've managed to do it a little bit of justice. Hope everything is good with you

love love love x

Pints of Guiness Make You Strong

Hello everyone, due to the internet installing fellow forgetting the router (the Mexican freaked out) we are still without internet. So apologies if I havent replied to any emails or facebooks or whatevers, I will do.

Everything is good apart from that it is absoutely freezing! This is not what any of us signed up for. The sun is shining only for you to step out in a shirt before the cold hits you and you scamper defeated to go and get a coat. This hasn´t been helped by being given a new class which is half an hour out of the city. It means getting up in the dark and cold and trudging to the car to be emasculated by Cormac´s sat nav, which is a lonely and bitter piece of equipment. The class is a washing machine factory in the middle of the countryside, and everyone seems a bit ´Norfolk´. It also smells terrible beyond belief. Its so bad it makes you physically wretch. This has been counterbalanced by a lovely class of one man, who is a football fanatic, history nerd, who speaks fantastic English, so what´s not to like? He almost hugged me like I was his long lost son when he found out I did a history degree. We had one lesson on appeasement, it was bliss.

Last night was also the big CLEN college dinner. A chance for us all to get together and make awkward small talk with our employers. It was really nice though apart from feeling sick after eating my own (considerable) body weight in pasta. In excess not seen since 1970s cock rock Spain doesn´t do starters, it does two main courses, I was taken completley by surprise by this so had already eaten a load of bread. It was a marathon and proof that those guys in America who eat 90 hotdogs in 3 minutes deserve to be considered among the greatest athletes alive. The night continued the way all good nights should do with Worlds Strongest Man, Terry Hollands was doing England proud. It was a multinational evening. I met a German who helped to reverse some of the suspicion gained from a book entitled ¨The Germans Will Try It Again" and a Mexican waitor who lived in London so littered his speech with mates, sons and al´wights. I felt bad for him when two collegues laid into his resturaunt for a good while, he took it well. There was also a Spanish guy whose favourite past time is to stand at the start line of the bull run and tell drunk foriegners that they are going to die. Good clean fun. It ended crawling into bed at five and I have spent today feeling sorry for myself.

Somehow I´ve managed to get recruited into a football team, a pub quiz team and even, for the love of God, a Gaelic football team. I youtubed it (using the word youtube as a verb, whatever next?) to find this brief explanation. Treat yourselves to a little look.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4GKlbk2J_o?

Not being much of a sportsman, with the exception of sock football and Mario Kart (some people don´t think of these as sports but I do) I imagine after ten minutes I´ll probably be flat on my back, completely out of breath, out my depth and maybe even weeping a little. I did say I would try though and in true warm and fuzzy sentiment thats the best anyone can do.

Theres also been a surprising amount of coverage of Stephen Gatleys death, I hope you are all coping. It replaced the news story that the prime ministers daughters are goths which had been on TV for ages.

apologies again, a return to proper blogging soon.

love to your mothers x

House of Cards

Greetings. Sorry about the lack of proper blogging, with pictures n that, but the internet is still not installed in our flat. As with most things in Spain they will do it when they are damn well ready and not a moment before. The internet lady was VERY clear when she said there was to be no putting off photos onto her computers. Theres a little girl next to me watching the Jonas brothers on Youtube. When will they just stamp ´Property of the Disney Corporation´on their heads and end the chriade? The sooner I can stop coming here, the better.

I thought I would thus use this lull to treat you all to a little history lesson about Pamplona. I realise now that this won´t be too comprehensive as when researching (typing into Google) the history of Pamplona there are more results for the history of Pampers. Why does the world need over 600,000 pages about the history of Pampers? Nonetheless...

Pamplona ¡s named after the Roman general Pompey the Great. The article also helpful informs me that the Roman empire didn´t last forever, no one told me. The original people of the area were the Vascons who despite being conquered never stopped asserting their independence. The number of Basque flags and banners for Basque independence around the city demonstrate that that independent streak is still very much alive. Charlemange paid a visit and like any bad guest just hung around before smashing your city walls and leaving. This makes me feel like I may have misjudged CAN, they are clearly still scarred by this and that is why my account is contributing to paying for the upkeep of the things. Rest assured if Charlemange tries it again I´ll be ready with a group of angry townsfolk. Being dead for over a thousand years hasn´t lessened my suspicion of him.

Pamplona´s golden age was the 11th century, so I´ve just missed it´s peak. It became the independent kingdom of Navarre. Navarre is still the name of the region and the people are still fiercly proud of it, some of the kids I teach write their nationality as Navarese. Pilgrims travelling on the Way of St. James to Santiago de Compostela travelled through Pamplona which led to a boom that only Catholic walkers can provide. To this very day there are still loads of pilgrims walking through the city on the same route. They all have huge bags and more than one walking stick. Not much of it is religous these days just people in the 60´s whose kids are out of the door, the mortage is paid off and they have nothing better to do than walk the length of Northern Spain. Their grown kids sitting at home head in hands crying over just how much of their inheritance has been spent.

It became a part of Spain in 1512 and was used as a fortress town to keep out the French. It did so until Napeleon strutted in as he did throughout most of the rest of Europe. Being a fortress town it wasn´t allowed to expand beyond the walls so it only started to grow in 1915 when they finally cottoned on that the days of citadels had passed. This accounts for its small size.

The running of the bulls comes started in the 14th century when people tried to speed the bulls going to market by offering themselves as bait. Maybe I could use the same tactics with the internet people? It became competitive and before you know it there are over 1.5 million drunk tourists sleeping in your bus stops.

As you can see it isn´t a hive of historical activity, but its not bad.

Other than that I live to lesson plan. I forgot how busy you can be. TEFL not the doss you might believe, I never thought of it as a proper job until I started. I finally met our new house mate, he claims to be doing masters but all I´ve seen him do is watch TV and eat pork burgers. He´s nice though. Other than that I´ve been developing an addiction to flavoured milk (some have crack I have milk, each to their own), rediscovered a love for CNN and finally found a shop that sells mince. Oh and I spend a lot of time defending Charlton to Spaniards, who know nothing about football, with sentiments along the lines of "Just because you´ve never heard of them..." and "Have Osasuna just beaten Barnet in the Johnson Paint Trophy? No, I didn´t think so."

I hope I´ve not bored you, I probably have.

love love love x

Phil Neville

Hello! The internet place is very lively today, theres a Chinese woman behind me chatting away into skype, in fact now she is singing, theres a man watching soft porn to my right and the Nigerian woman who owns it even smiled at me. Heady days indeed.

So ends my first proper teaching week at CLEN college (it transpires it has its own name) and overall its been good. The lessons were fun, my students are lovely and I´m getting back in the swing. One lesson was great as the subject was the media and the textbook, a mainstream English textbook, taught that the Daily Mail is a racist newspaper so I got paid to lay into the Daily Mail for an hour and a half. Every now and again you get a lesson that just goes horribly wrong. I had one of those on Wednesday. You know they just don´t understand and you try and try but they still don´t understand and you want the ground to swallow you and drag you to the circle of hell reserved for teachers who can´t explain the concept of a hero to some 11 year olds.

My timetable is being settled and they took away all my teenage classes. I was pretty happy until I met the replacements. A class of six eight year olds whose only words in English are ´teacher´ and ´why´ at a private Catholic school. It´s strange teaching under a picture of a Saint, I´m not sure which one. Being paranoid it did cross my mind whether they would ask me if I was a Catholic or they´d be suspicous of my Protestant ways, "what do you mean you don´t accept transubstantiation?!?!?" but so far so good. After the class I actually wanted my teenage classes back. It´s not that they are bad kids, quite the opposite, its that they are kids. School has finished and rather than going home and doing whatever the devil it is that Spanish kids do, they have to stay and do an hour of English. They want to run around, sit on the desk, punch each other and throw each others stuff around the class. I´m sure it will soon become normal, at least I hope so or next time you see me I might be rocking back and forth slowly muttering "Ignacio put the compass down" over and over again.

Life outside of school is good as well. Went to Osasuna at the weekend. The ground is about the size of the Valley but they stands are much steeper so you feel really close. The front row is incrediably close to the pitch as the linesman found out when fans actually reached over and tapped him on the shoulder so they could politley inform him that they disagreed with his desicion to his face. Osasuna aren´t bad and beat Sporting Gijon 1-0. I do need to learn how to whistle. Been out a few nights. One ended with Mauro playing harmonica (where is there always a harmonica?) while the rest of us tried to make up blues lyrics on the spot, the best I came up with was "oh I wish it was me, but she left me for a man called Steve". That sort of rhymes. The record contract is probably in the post.

We´ve acquired two house mates, a Mexican called Daniel and a Spanish guy who none of us have actually set eyes on. Stuff appeared in the spare bedroom and a note was left on the table that worringly read "Hi there boys!!" and not a trace of him since.

I´m beginning to like Pamplona more and more. The old town is fantastic, the buildings are colourful and unique and they tower above you but you don´t feel trapped in. Theres always a good chance of coming across something as well, today there were guys playing the trumpet, accordian, saxaphone and a massive drum while people were dancing and singing in the street. There´s a lot of statues which I always appreachiate. Theres lots of green space, its clean and safe and I´m now able to leave the map at home. Which is great as it turns out map reading is not something I excel in. So get yourself on a plane.

love love love x