Life in Cartagena

One of my students was shocked at the price of the plane tickets to the UK at the beginning of this month. He didn't know about the English school system of half terms. With more potential customers for the planes the ticket prices had risen substantially. Here there are no half terms. School is just about to finish for the summer break. Maggie's children finish tomorrow leaving the teachers alone for the last week to close down the school year. All being well Maggie will be back at school on September 1st and the children will return a week later. So the school summer break is all of July and all of August. The school day is also a bit shorter for the youngsters in June and in September. At Christmas the term ends, for teachers and children alike, around  December 23rd and they go back around January 8th, a couple of days after the Three Kings have delivered their presents. The Easter break is a bit shorter; all of the Easter week and maybe a day or two a...

The one place that offers general Spanish for foreigners courses in Cartagena - the Fundación de Cartagena para la Enseñanza de la Lengua y la Cultura Española  - has an annoying habit of putting on its courses when we're working. Maggie has never managed to find a course that has fitted in with her timetable but, just once in three years of trying, I did. We're an unreliable lot though, we foreigners, and after a few months my course fizzled out through lack of numbers. Shame. The Fundación had organised something for this afternoon  - a sort of club for foreigners to get together and speak Spanish. We met at the language school and then headed off for a local bar, the one in the photo. About a dozen of us all told: Dutch, Irish and Brits as well as the two Spanish teachers. Not an Earth shattering experience but not bad at all and all for 2€ per person.

I got paid on Friday. I always enjoy payday. One of my favourite days of the month. Normally I'm only iterested in the take home figure but today, as I collected my wage slips, I had to sign so many bits of paper that I was sufficiently stirred to ask my boss which convenio I work under. Convenios are the agreements that the Employers Associations hammer out with the Trades Unions and which set the baseline terms and conditions for any worker in every sort of job. I don't know exactly how they are organised but I presume that there are convenios for broad areas, like food preparation, with more detailed convenios within each sector; bakers for instance. I'm in a sector called something like Unaccredited Studies which falls under Private Education. The convenios add all of the detail to the barebones contracts which seem, from my limited experience, to give only the essential information such as who's employed by whom, for how long and with what holiday entitlement. ...

I'm often vaguely amused when buying things in Spain. Ten stamps please; the stamps are 32 cents each - out comes the calculator to arrive at the 3.20€ - the basis of a decimal system seems to have escaped the shopkeeper. Two packets of cigars please 2.50€ a go, calculator time again or, this morning, 1.50€+1.20€ at the paper shop - more work for Texas Instruments. Yesterday the report of the Organisation for Economic and Co-operation and Development released its report on educational performance in 65 countries. Shanghai (China must be a big place to survey) was top in maths, science and reading comprehension whilst Kyrgyzstan was bottom. Spain was below the OECD average in all three areas coming in the mid 30s. I noticed that Castilla y Leon, the authority that Maggie was teaching in at the time of the survey, did much better than Murcia, the region she teaches in now. The Spanish news reports all used words like mediocre. I suppose that explains it then

I think it's a personal best. On saturday I did eight museums in a day. Considering that phrase I've realised it contains at least two untruths or, as we Yorkshire folk call them, lies. In the first place they weren't all museums. A guided visit around the Cathedral in Orihuela or a tour around the Modernist Old Town Hall in Cartagena isn't exactly a museum visit. And the last visit, to the Underwater Archaelogy Museum in Cartagena started at around 1.30am on Sunday morning. In spirit though it's true enough. I have been known to complain about Spanish Museums or rather the Spanish attitude to imparting imformation in displays of one sort and another. The guides, the guide books and the information boards seem to delight in using terminology that means nothing to the layperson whilst missing out the key facts or giving any life to what you're seeing. So we'd get "designed in 1962 and built of a titanium and aluminium shell by British Aircraft Corpo...

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...