Life in Cartagena

The Education Office in Murcia was heaving with people when Maggie went to sign off her new contract on Wednesday. Apparently it was the day that results in the Oposiciones - the competitive exams that local government and civil servants take to guarantee them a "job for life" - had been published and all those hopeful teachers had gone to see how they'd done. We went on to Cartagena to have a look at her new school - José Maria de Lapuerta - named apparently for a famous architect. The district or barrio looked pretty normal to us, a bit down at heel in places but a good, solid working class district with plenty of signs of a recent influx of people from other countries - kebab houses, places to make cheap phone calls to Nigeria, Sierra Leone or Rumania and strange vegetables in the greengrocers. We had a first look around Cartagena city centre too, I dropped off a CV in any language school we passed and we sort of looked at rental prices and what not. The first of m...