The first visit

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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 many visits I presume and just 109kms and 85 minutes from Culebrón.

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