So we saw England muddle to a draw and Spain lose despite controlling all of the game except the bit that mattered. No shouting in the streets here, just mumbling as they left the bar.
I think it's Old Harrovians that use the song Forty Years On as the school anthem but I wouldn't have been too surprised if Maggie had started humming it as she pottered around the flat yesterday evening. Maggie works at José María de Lapuerta School here in Cartagena teaching five year olds English as part of the British Council Bilingual English Project. Last night she went to an evening do as the start of the celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of the school. She came back with all sorts of stories - about how the petroleum company Repsol first founded the school in 1969 and built the local housing as part of a "model village" type project for it's employees. She told me how well the school has been doing in the local chess league and how the school has also won a prize for the quality of it's excellence in sports teaching. She reminded me that the school had also won the "Silver Blackboard" (there isn't a gold one, silver is as g...
We saw nine flats today. Alright, as two were on the same landing maybe we "really" saw eight but the range was incredible. From modern, double glazed, furnished at Ikea to a place where the louvred grill in the kitchen gave a good view into the tiny bathroom. Most were a bit seedy with Oxfam furniture and a vaguely unpleasant odour. Only one had aircon and none had any form of fixed heating. Just as in the UK flat hunting is a tedious process. There are basically two ways. Wander the streets and look for signs attached to the balcony and ring the owner direct. Or go to an Estate Agent and ask what they have. There are classified ads in papers too but usually the number of properties listed is small. We started with the Estate Agent route. It's an expensive option because as well as the month's deposit and the month's rent that everyone asks for in Spain the agent also charges a month's worth of rent for matching you and the property. Most of the properties w...
I learn a lot about the country I live in by prying into the private lives of my students. Sometime last Autumn I asked the inevitable Monday lesson question about what a student had done at the weekend. The young woman in question had spent some time putting away her summer clothes and bringing out her winter clothes. I was impressed. Such order. Come Spring I asked the same student if she had liberated her summer clothes from their Winter storage yet. A couple of weeks still to go she said. I was relaying the story of this, to me, remarkable behaviour to another group of students as a prelude to a similar question to them. I didn't get very far. They all thought it was perfectly normal behaviour. They did it too. Today on Ondacero radio there was a mention of one of their more well known presenters, Carlos Herrera, talking about this very phenomenon on his show last week. Obviously this is a nationwide event in Spain. I'm pretty sure that we Brits don't do go thro...
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