El Guiri y La Andaluza

October 26, 2015October 26, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

What. A. Night. No, seriously, what a night. It really does look beautiful from the abandoned hillside of the Via Verde at five o’clock in the morning. The night sky is terrific. You could save yourself several hundred quid and skip Wadi Rum for this, if getting locked out of a hostel doesn’t bother you.

Oh, to own a camera good enough to capture all the night skies I’ve seen!

Yes, he’s done it again. Yours truly has managed to spend another night locked out and consigned to wandering in the twilight. But that’s ok. Any other night might really bother me, but my bus home isn’t until five o’clock in the afternoon, and frankly, for everything that happened tonight, I’d be locked out all over again just to live it through once more.

Hallelujah, it’s almost dawn…

The reunion of the decade was everything I wanted it to be and more (and I just saw a shooting star racing overhead as I looked up for inspiration. This was meant to be). That my former classmates hadn’t forgotten me is a given; though Olvera has a tenaciously stalwart expat scene, I was the English kid there too, the guiri, one of only three in the primary school (the other two being my younger brother and a tot in the infantil group, both desperately shy when it came to mingling). So that doesn’t surprise me all that much. That they should be so happy to see me after so many years, however, is something I can hardly believe. This is a town where friendships are cast for life. Within ten minutes I was nattering away in Spanish as I never knew I could, as though I’d never left at all. Jorge was quick to point out that I’d improved a great deal since the last time we met, which leads me to wonder when exactly that happened, as I recall acing my Spanish GCSE two years early. Perhaps it has something to do with actually knuckling under and learning the preterite. Otherwise, I’ll take it on trust.

Where to begin? How does one even embark upon nine lost years? I’d spent most of the morning narrowing down the years into the most worthy tales, and the rest of the time looking up any key words that might have escaped me, from the lesbian ex-girlfriend to the misunderstanding with the Guardia Civil and my successive failed attempts at tracking them down before. It was quite entertaining to play the Storyteller, but it was better still to hear all the things they’d been up to. Foolishly I’d expected them all to be in the same big group from primary school – a technical oversight anyone with half a brain could have known in advance – and it came as a fair surprise to see how everyone had splintered off. That’s growing up, though. I have to admit their voices alone sent my head spinning. When last I knew this lot, we were primary school kids with unbroken voices. Oddly enough I got the same start on being addressed by Jorge in his low Olvereñan bass that my entire generation got when Ron wound down the window and said ‘Hiya Harry’ at the opening of The Chamber of Secrets.

Jorge had to spark off to Málaga to another party – they’re all driving now – and we called it a night. I’d only just taken off my jumper when Alicia, another old friend of mine, gave me a buzz to let me know she’d arrived. Cue Catch-Up Round Two over tapas with Little Miss Popular before she invited me out to a night out on the town with her girls. What could I say? A night out with five Spanish girls, and andaluzas at that? That’s not the kind of invitation you turn aside.

Breaking the habit of a decade to celebrate the quest of a decade!

I hadn’t exactly planned on sampling Olvereñan nightlife, but it found me nonetheless. All I need say is that it was everything I’ve ever wanted from a club – and this in nothing more than a bar, no less: great atmosphere, a broad clientele, impeccable music (zero Taylor Swift – sorry) and a crowd quite happy to get up and dance. Alicia taught me to dance the bachata and I taught her a few moves of my own. I haven’t ever had such an obliging dance partner – mostly because in the UK, any guy really going for it in a club is almost instantly written off as gay and given a wide berth by all but the most determined non-closet cases (speaking from experience). When Alicia left to grab another Barcecola to share, I was hailed over by a group of girls sitting at a table across the floor who asked the inevitable question. But instead of surprise when I said I wasn’t gay, they gave me an encore. ‘Hombre, tienes dos cojones y bailas muy bien,’ said one, ‘podrías salir con cualquier chica que te apetece.’ That’s probably not strictly true, but it’s a damned sight better than the usual British reaction. England, you could learn a lot from this world.

Having way too much fun to bother about blur

The bar gradually began to empty and eventually it was just the guiri and the andaluza left on the floor. We clocked out just before four o’clock, closing time, and left the night there. Four hours of dancing. Think about that for a second. That’s more than brilliant. It’s bloody phenomenal. 2015’s been the best year yet, but that night trumps the lot: Saad Lamjarred, June Ball and the Music Durham inaugural concert in Durham Cathedral, they don’t even come close. And Alicia tells me that’s just a regular night; next week is a puente, and the parties will be better, busier and longer. And so I find myself on the bus back to Seville, happy in the knowledge that I’ll be back in Olvera in five days’ time. If that’s how the rest of my year abroad is set to pan out, I’m one happy guy.

It’s going to be a year spent living a double-life: one as a teacher in Villafranca under one name, the other as a party animal in Olvera under the other. English in one location, Spanish in another. So we’re juggling again. But I’ve been juggling for several years now and I’m getting the hang of it.

Seriously, though. There are only a few times in my life I’d willingly relive. I don’t look back. Last night, however, was definitely one of them. BB x

Homecoming

October 25, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

How do I begin to describe it? The feeling of being home again, some nine years after I left? It’s like your first ever Christmas morning. Like getting into a hot bath at the end of a hard working day. Like falling in love for the second time. All these things at once. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen it, every time I see that silhouette on the horizon, there are tears in my eyes and my heart starts racing.

I’ve lived in several places during my twenty-one years of existence, from Dover to Durham to Boroboro and beyond, but no one hometown has ever had the same effect on me as Olvera. Not even El Rocío stirs up quite the same initial rush, like a starstorm in my heart, and El Rocío is far and away my favourite place on the planet. Maybe that’s Olvera’s own magic at work. I wasn’t born here and I didn’t even live here for all that long – all of ten months and more – but if anybody asks, I always tell them that this is where I grew up. Pretentious, yes, but there’s more than vague half-blood pride behind that statement. I was twelve when I moved here, and turned thirteen just over a week after I returned to England, so I was here at a critical time for growing up. I had my first crush out here. I developed a serious passion for languages, I had my musical awakening – and consequently began to toy with the idea of abandoning my violin – and, perhaps most importantly of all, I became the avid naturalist that I am today. Oh, I’ve always been stark-raving mad about animals, but it was only here when it got to the stage where I started going out on my own and putting names to things furry and feathered (mostly feathered) without the aid of a book. My own book came into its own here – I even went on local TV to advertise it when the chance arose. Essentially, the four pillars of my life, music, writing, travel and nature, were cast here, from the same marble that mottles the rolling hills that cradle the lonely peak of Olvera.

Oh, and of course, Andalucía, like a shard from the Devil’s mirror, lodged itself in my heart and I’ve not been able to remove it since.
I’ve used the word ‘heart’ three times now. I’m aware of that. I’ll try to keep a level head. It’s not an easy thing to do right now.

But simply being here isn’t the best part. In truth I’ve made three return trips since 2007, once with my family, once with mum when we were grounded by the Eyjafjallajökll eruption and the third, the last, towards the end of my crazy pan-Iberian adventure back in 2013 when, my endurance failing me, I turned from my road towards the homely peaks of the Sierra de Grazalema. On all three occasions I tried to find my old school companions, without success. This time, armed with WhatsApp, I’ve finally managed to track them down, and a reunion of almost a decade in the making is on the cards. Excited? You bet I am. Ecstatic? That doesn’t even cover it. I’ve been planning this day in my head for the last nine years, adding new stories every year. I’m still going to walk into it and freelance it anyway, but that doesn’t kill the hype. These are people I haven’t seen since we were primary school children with brightly-coloured rucksacks and unbroken voices. I’ll bet I’m still the one who sands out a mile with the blonde hair and the blue eyes – and now, of course, the shirts – but I wonder how much will be refreshingly familiar?

I get the feeling they’re planning something behind my back as well. All I have is a time and a place, the rest is Cristina’s doing. I have twenty-four hours. That’s perfect. It means that I can spend tonight rediscovering the delights of my old Friday night haunt, the pizzeria Lirios. Better still, the red murder that’s scarred my face since Jordan is fading away thanks to a visit to the doctor yesterday, and only just in time. With a little luck, I’ll be as good as new by tomorrow.

It’s coming up to nine o’clock. I think I’ll wander on up to Lirios. I wonder if the ginger-haired porter from the Hotel Sierra y Cal who used to frequent the place is still there? If anyone in this town would recognise me, it’d be him. He was the first Olvereñan I ever met. It would be so very fateful if he were. There’s an air of fate hanging about this whole weekend. That’s what I’m feeling. BB x

Creativity in the Classroom: A Step Too Far?

October 20, 2015October 20, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I´m falling into something of a routine out here, now. Three hours with the state school, two hours with the Catholic school, one hour´s private English lesson, one hour´s Spanish conversation with my flatmate, a couple of hour´s reading and then bed. That´s good. I like a routine. It lets me know what I´m doing. I tend to go a bit spare without exact orders.

As I guessed all along, the term ´language assistant´ is a very loose one, interpreted by different schools in different ways. Some of my companions are working as ´classic´ language assistants, taking individuals or small groups for short periods for conversation. Others attend class with an English teacher as a human dictionary, there to lend a hand whenever a native speaker´s touch is needed. In Spanish, the term ´language assistant´ gets shortened down to just one word – auxiliar – which leaves even more room for interpretation. And just as happened in the last two ´language assistant´ jobs I´ve had, I seem to be working a real teacher rota.

Granted, I had prior warning this time. The first time I was promoted, so to speak, I had no idea that I was supposed to be taking full classes on my own until I was told that the diminutive head of the French department had decided to benefit from my presence by taking a month´s holiday at short notice. This time I was given a couple of lessons´ observation to get the feel of it, and even though they mostly left me leading the events – a harbinger, I guess – it was good to know what I was getting myself in for in advance.

So I´m a sub-teacher. That´s not a problem. In fact, it´s exactly what I wanted. It´s just… well, it´s reassuring to know that it doesn´t matter where you go in the world, ´language assistant´ is always a very flexible term.

In one school I take entire classes on my own, from bawling primary level to studious upper sixth. In the other I also prepare an hour´s class for whichever groups of the twelve I have that day – equally widely-spread, but fortunately without the weekly terrors of the primaria – and these are almost always under the supervision and occasional assistance of one of the English staff. The irony there is that they´re probably doing what comes under my job description. The system in place is the one used by bilingual schools nationwide: one class where the language of conversation can only be English, to compliment the others which are spent on writing and grammar. Nobody likes grammar. So that means it´s my class that everyone looks forward to by default, which is something to smile about.

Taking a full class obviously means you need an hour´s worth of material, and with teenagers thrown into the mix, you need to be prepared for all eventualities. I´m learning what to do when they´re tired, and how to calm them down when they´re exciteable, without letting them know there´s a system to it all. I´m learning what ideas students wants to discuss and which ones turn them off, and which games work well, and which ones don´t. And though I should have seen it coming a mile off, I tried this week once again with what is and always has been the greatest stumbling block of all: tapping into the students´ creativity.

Now this is something I feel very strongly about, and I´ve already written one behemoth of a text this week, so I´ll tackle it as lightly as I can. The simple fact of the matter is that there isn´t enough emphasis placed on creativity in schools these days. To tell the truth, I´m not entirely sure there ever has been. One of my English teachers once announced at a parents´ evening that she was ´paid to teach, not to inspire´. I disagree entirely. Inspiration should be right at the front of teaching, if we´re not all to become mindless robots.

Ah, but this is beginning to smack of yesterday´s post. It´s vaguely related, primarily because the game I´ve been ending my technology lessons with – a simplified variation on the British radio show I´m Sorry I Haven´t A Clue´s “Good News, Bad News” – has, time and again, come up dead in the water. The reason? Because nobody´s able to tap into their own creativity. I don´t know whether it got stamped out of the education system in favour of textual comprehension or the study of presentational devices – the kind of stuff that actually comes up in an exam – but the art of coming up with stories seems to disappear once you hit secondary school level.

For a budding author, I find this nothing short of horrifying. I spent most of my school career writing stories, and yes, it probably did affect my grades, but I left with an impressive English mark, and it´s my English that has always saved my neck. I´d have been flat-out rejected from grammar school if it hadn´t been for my English, since my mathematical capability is comparable to that of a wet flannel. The only excuse I can think of is that I´ve never stopped writing: from short stories to novels, diaries to blogs, love letters to newspaper articles. It keeps me alive. More importantly, it keeps my brain alive.

The higher up the education system you go, the less you´re encouraged to think for yourself. At some point you have to start quoting other writers. Then you have to start referencing other texts you´ve read and basing your arguments on the standpoints of extinct luminaries. The result, of course, is that by the time you get to university and you´re suddenly encouraged to come up with your own argument, a lot of people are quite understandably left high and dry, because they haven´t been taught how to think that way.

Here´s the difficulty. Creativity cannot be taught. It can be encouraged, it can be inspired, but it cannot be taught. For starters, how do you mark creativity? This is a regular feature of the arts world, of course, but outside the tripartite kingdom of Art, Music and Drama, creativity doesn´t get all that much of a look-in. In a world where everybody is mark-centric, from pupils to parents to headmasters and the governors to whom they bow, that kind of question gets thrown out early on, and the baby with the bathwater. So me going headlong into a class of fifteen year-olds and expecting them to come up with a story in fifteen minutes of “Good News, Bad News” was the very height of foolishness, especially for somebody with two jobs´ worth of teaching experience under his belt. A different English teacher – one who certainly did know how to inspire – once told us that the truth of the matter is that there are those who can, and those who can´t. I´m still not entirely sure where I stand on that, since I´m none too keen to cut anybody off, but I acknowledge that there´s more than a kernel of truth in that statement.

Creativity, I believe, is something that we´re all born with. We all loved to listen to stories when we were children, and most of us will have tried our hand at making one or two, intentionally or no. Heck, it´s fuelled language growth, all the arts and technology for all human existence. The trouble is that so much of it disappears when we grow up, when we´re told we have to put fiction behind us and focus on the real world. Unless you´re a stubborn little bastard like me, and you decide early on to defy that and to hold on to your creativity and remain a child forever. Like a twenty-first century Peter Pan.

In short, it´s perhaps too much to expect every student to be able to create stories of their own, especially at secondary level. There are a few rogue elements – it´s not difficult to recognise your own characteristics in others – but on the whole it strays much too far into the awkward silence minefield. Well, I´ve learned my lesson (no pun intended). But I´m not about to concede defeat. Never. I doubt I´ll make story-tellers out of the lot of them, but if I can sow the seeds of a budding Cervantes or Lope amongst the drowsy horde, I´ll consider my job accomplished. At the end of the day, we´re all story-tellers in one way or another. All it takes is the courage to leave behind what is real and to dabble with what is not. I said right at the start that I like exact orders. True. But there´s enough of an anarchist in me to want to break free sometimes. I hope there´s a little anarchy in everybody. BB x

The Trouble with WhatsApp

October 19, 2015October 19, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

By the time this blog post reaches you, it’ll have been several hours since I finished writing this article. In a world where so much of what we do is instant, from long-distance communication to microwaveable dinners, it’s both painful and exhilarating to be stuck on what seems like a desert island in the wavestorm. Perhaps even a little rebellious, too. So, in a way, quite a bit like sex. But what do I know?

I’m currently living in a very comfortable two-bedroom flat on the edge of town, just a three minute walk from school and a seven minute walk to the nearest supermarket. During the week I share it with a flatmate some ten years older than me who returns home to his family every weekend, leaving the flat all to me if I’m not traveling. That’s just to give you some background detail. We agreed early on that there wasn’t much point in getting internet for the flat, despite his having access to a discounted deal, as we have no mainline phone, but chiefly because there’s free internet whenever we want it at school.

That means one thing: I live under a communication curfew. When school finally shuts its doors at half past nine, I’m off the grid until the following morning.

To my knowledge there are two other WiFi access points in town, if you don’t count all the cafés and bars: there’s the hotspot in the town park, and the WiFi service operated by the town’s youth hostel. I’ve been leeching off both for the last month, but neither are reliable. The park is a very hit-and-miss affair; sometimes there’s WiFi, sometimes there isn’t. Usually, there isn’t. The albergue is normally operational, but it’s a longer walk, and you have to be inside the front door to get a good signal, and that just looks plain suspicious. Which it is. I only play that card these days if I’m out of all other options and really need to contact somebody.

The crux of the matter is that I’m leading a largely internet-free existence. I’m not fully weaned of the system by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve taken the first few steps.

For one thing, YouTube no longer dominates my spare time the way it used to. I haven’t even accessed YouTube since I left England some four weeks ago. Nor do I have the option to spend hours trawling Facebook for whatever reason I used to do so. And since nobody out here ever uses SMS – this is a world where WhatsApp has well and truly taken over – my contact with the outside world is limited to an average of an hour a day: which, when you think about it, is still more than what you need. In an hour you can send and reply to a few messages, check your emails, Google a query that might have been troubling you and still have time to check the news. Anything more than that is unnecessary.

The trouble, as I’ve already mentioned, is WhatsApp. The whole world seems to turn on it, and Spain in particular has taken a really obsessive shine to it. All communication happens through WhatsApp. ‘Join our WhatsApp group’, ‘envíame una WhatsApp’, ‘don’t bother with Facebook, I haven’t checked mine in weeks, message me on WhatsApp’… I hear the same lines every day, unfailingly echoed word for word, like quotes from a cult film. It seems to be the only way people keep in touch, both personally and professionally. Even my colleagues among the staff have their own WhatsApp group, which swamps me with some three hundred new messages each time I’m back in wireless range. I asked a class to guess how many messages they send a day – upon investigation, every single one has both a smartphone and WhatsApp – and got the answer five hundred. As an absolute minimum.

I don’t know whether it’s the same in England, because I never could get WhatsApp on my old phone, so I never bothered. It’s an undercurrent I’ve done without thus far. And I don’t know whether, like Facebook, eBooks and Instagram, I’ll get sucked into the mire like everyone else in time, but I hope not. Face-to-face conversation is so much more worthwhile, worth waiting for. Surely there’s no need to go on talking into the small hours, firing round after round of thumbs-up, smileys, voice clips and the rest of the arsenal? I’m a very chatty bean when I want to be, but only if I’ve anything worth saying – small talk is something I’ve never really mastered, let alone understood – and anything worth saying is worth saying face-to-face. Cue Thumper: ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all’.

The hypocrisy of my argument is this blog, of course. But as I said before, these posts are usually conversations with myself more than informative insights – as well as being my university job.

I thought I’d broach the subject because I had a particularly fulfilling debate with my Seniors class on this and other subjects last week. I had them explain to me the Spanish attitude to the online world and their stance on the blight of WhatsApp. They’re all well and truly connected, but they were at least able to recognize the foolishness of it. A few observations from my students, for the record:

Facebook is for older people. (This is notable because that’s how it was, once upon a time, in the UK, before it became a social staple for everybody from eleven and up.)
Instagram is only for artistic photos, not for food. (Preach.)
Checking in should be solely a holiday feature, if you ever use it.
WhatsApp is a problem, but it’s unavoidable – and cheaper than SMS.

In my internet-free evenings, I’m getting a lot more done than I used to. I’m reading more. I’m writing more. I’m even watching the odd film on TV. The news suddenly means a lot more to me, now that I’m not getting it ticker-tape-style every second. And the conversations I have with the people I live and work with on a daily basis are so much more entertaining for the silence between each encounter. News is fresh and comes in a wave, and I enjoy that. It’s a hermit life, but I’ve always been rather partial to that kind of existence.

Please don’t take this as a holier-than-thou condemnation of the rest of the world. I’m the one at fault, the Luddite, the Philistine; as usual, it’s probably yet another case of ‘it’s not the rest of the world, it’s you’. (More’s the fool I am for having left my weekly shop to a Sunday, when everywhere is shut… Tch. Catholic countries. Looks like lentils and rice for dinner once again…) What it is is a welcome break from the year abroad whines and shines that we’re all bombarding you with right now, though you might read it as a wake-up call to myself and others as well, before we’re all swamped by the touch-talk phenomenon of the twenty-first century… if you’re so inclined.

If you made it all the way to the end of this tirade, all I can say is I admire your stamina, and thank you for your patience – I had quite a lot to get off my chest! I’ll leave the musing and tell you all about this past weekend’s adventures as soon as I find a way of getting my photos off my old SLR. In the meantime, I’ll reward your endurance by giving you a final insight into something sweeter.

This coming weekend I’m finally returning to my old hometown of Olvera, some nine years after I left for England for good. I can’t wait to see my old friends again, as I was still a child when last I saw them, but there’s one in particular I’d dearly like to see. She was a good friend, and one of the only ones I haven’t yet got back in touch with, for whatever reason. But I’m saving all nine years of stories for when I see her, like something out of the fairy tales I spend my life writing. It’s childish, foolish and more than a little bit wet, but it’s a damned sight more real than a buzz in your pocket. That is the reality of it, and that’s this year’s big project: breaking free. BB x

The Griffon

October 17, 2015January 3, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

‘Si te intereses a las aves, hay un buitre al otro lado del río. Hay mucha gente allí esperando que los bomberos lo remuevan. Por si lo sabes…’

The last thing on the hostel TV last night, after the late night showing of Colombiana, was a brief news report documenting the beginnings of a rise in interest in ornithology in Extremadura. I have to say I’m impressed; surprised and impressed. In my experience of living and working in Spain, the most interest the majority of ‘folk here take in birds is whether or not they go well with olive oil. Spain’s not unique in this regard. As my secondary school Physics teacher once said when I explained the risk the Bristol wind farm posed to migrating waterfowl, ‘if it won’t end up on my plate, I couldn’t give a monkey’s’. And that was in England, the biggest nation of bleeding hearts. Well, here’s a little proof that Spain at least is finally taking a turn for the better.

I’ve got a fairly long wait until the bus home, so I thought I’d take a walk along the Guadiana again whilst I’m here and look across the river to Portugal. The cormorants were out on the rocks with their wings spread wide after a morning’s hunting, so I got my camera out for a few shots with Respighi’s The Pines of Rome playing in my ears. And that’s when I got a tap on the shoulder and a friendly local pointed me in the direction of a grounded vulture on the east bank of the river.

I haven’t power-walked so fast in years. A vulture? Here, in the middle of Badajoz? It sounded too ridiculous a notion to be a lie, so I packed up my gear and left the bridge and the sunning cormorants I was photographing behind in the dust. At first I thought he might have confused buitre with any other large bird – it wouldn’t be the first time – but this just must be my lucky weekend or something, because just a short distance before the second bridge…

…boom. Sulking in the shade of the roadworks with a crowd of five or six startled onlookers. It could hardly be anything else: vultures are bloody huge, even youngsters like this one.

I was worried that it might have a broken wing, as it didn’t seem particularly keen to get back into the air. What it was doing here, bang in the middle of the city, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it was simply tired. At any rate, it wasn’t all too bothered by the two men who’d gone down to join it, both to have a closer look at something you normally only see high in the sky above, and to ward off any dog-walkers that might cause the bird any further distress. My heart goes out to those two.

I have to admit, I probably won’t ever get a better viewing of a wild vulture than this. Not even in Monfragüe, which is the best place to see them in all of Spain. And here, in Badajoz, of all places! Bonkers.

‘Watch out,’ said one of the onlookers as it came bouncing forward, ‘That thing’s got a beak that can bite through bone.’

To everyone’s relief, there was nothing wrong with it in the end, because after some ten minutes it puffed up its feathers, made a few bounding leaps and took off into the air on two giant wings. It wheeled about over the river and almost flew headlong into the bridge, clearing it by little over a metre or so, and flew off in the direction of Portugal.

Not something you see every day! And now I need to go in search of a USB cable or card reader of some description, because my memory card is chock-full. Well, gallinules, kingfishers, cranes and a griffon vulture, all in twenty-four hours of city-hopping! Now there’s a feathery micro-adventure for you. BB x

And the Manacles are Off

October 16, 2015January 3, 2016 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

It’s over, at last! After almost a month of to-and-froing between school, the ayuntamiento and the Almendralejo police station, I have a Spanish bank account and the admin period is finally at an end. Alright, so there’s still some confusion over whether I really need a Spanish social security number and I’m not entirely sure how to top up my phone since it isn’t compatible with its own network app, but the most important stage (and one that, by the sounds of things, the other assistants accomplished weeks ago) is done and dusted.

So what better way to celebrate than with a little travel?

You see, I adore traveling. I’m sure I didn’t need to tell you that, but I feel like in the three weeks I’ve been here I’ve never had the chance to get out. Not for want of opportunity, of course, but I told myself right at the beginning that I wasn’t to go traveling until I’d finished all the paperwork. That was supposed to be before my (abortive) training course in Cáceres on 1st October. Well, now it’s the 16th. But that’s ok. Villafranca feels like home now, I’ve christened it with my first stupidly long walk, and I have to say I’m quite enjoying being ‘El Inglés’. But I’ve waited long enough, and now here I am in the Plaza Alta in Badajoz, enjoying a ración of some seriously high-quality croquetas as the city wakes up for the night.

A paltry three and a half euros took me all the way to Mérida, the regional capital of Extremadura. It’s also minuscule compared to Badajoz and Cáceres, for which the two provinces of Extremadura are named, which means you can get around the place in a couple of hours. I didn’t plan on staying long, since I only intended to use the city as a launch-pad for getting to Badajoz – there’s only one bus direct from Villafranca and it leaves at nine in the morning – but, as is so often the way of things, Mérida turned out to be a whole lot more than a collection of pristine Roman ruins.

At first glance it looks a lot like Córdoba, with the Roman bridge and the great big river splitting the old town from the new. But then, so does Badajoz. It’s missing the beauty of the mosque, of course, but then, Córdoba is and always will be in a league of its own. What it does have is a spectacular aqueduct on the north side of town. If you see any photos of Mérida, it’s bound to feature in more than one of them. Unlike the one in Segovia the city gave it breathing space and there’s a park around it now, but that hasn’t stopped the storks from taking advantage of all those convenient flat-topped towers.

Ah, but I can do better than that. It took me almost half an hour to cross the Roman bridge over the Guadiana this morning, not because of its length – you can span it in five minutes or less at a stride – but because I was held up by two of my favourite little riverside friends, both of them easy to spot because of all the noise they were making.

I haven’t been to Doñana National Park almost every year for the last seven years for nothing, and when I heard a distinctly disgruntled grunting cutting over the babble of an approaching horde of school kids, I was hanging over the side of the bridge and scanning the reeds in a flash; and sure enough, there he was. Old Longshanks himself.

What can I say? Gallinules. Love ’em. Loved the ridiculous things since I first saw a picture of one in a book. The name’s daft enough – Purple Swamp-Hen, in full – but the feet are something else.

I don’t know why I make such a big deal about gallinules over anything else, but they’ve always been the ultimate Doñana bird for me. Perhaps it’s because it’s basically a giant purple chicken. Mm, close enough.

Feathered friend number two should be a lot more familiar to most of you. He’s also rather colourful, but a heck of a lot smaller and shinier to boot. And once you know what they sound like, you’ll see a lot more of them. It’s a kingfisher, of course!

At least, I hope you know what a kingfisher is. Nobody here does. Not even if I give them the equally impressive Spanish name of martin pescador.

I’m still waiting on that perfect kingfisher photo. The one everyone wants: wings spread wide, water droplets falling from a dive, fish in beak etc. but until that moment, they’re always a pleasure to watch.

Everybody else was walking on by and doubtless wondering who that young loony was in the maroon hoodie-and-chinos combo with the ridiculous lens, hanging half over the bridge, but hey, I was having a good time. That’s my idea of a morning well spent, anyway.

Sheesh, long post. My travelogues usually are. Badajoz is rather beautiful, and if my right thigh weren’t still punishing me for that 45km cross-country hike last weekend, I’d probably be enjoying it more. I could do with a rest. It’s a lot bigger than Mérida and I had to double the distance when it turned out that the albergue I had in mind was a school groups affair. I was accosted outside by three young girls who asked me if I wanted a blowjob and called out ‘oyé, feo’ and ‘mochila verde’ after me when I ignored them. Then I tried taking a shortcut through the park into the Alcazaba, but shortcuts do tend to make long delays, and in this case the road came to a sudden and unexpected end. The door was there alright, but the road… wasn’t.

The adventures never end! Left the restaurant to soak up the night in the square and a wandering troupe of musicians asked me for directions to the ayuntamiento. I pointed them in the right direction, but their leader deduced that I clearly wasn’t from Badajoz. Back atcha, tío; ‘I’m from Villafranca de los Barros’. ‘Villafranca?! Hombre, somos de Ribera!’ (the next town along from VdB). It’s a small world. And I’ve just noticed that I missed a major performance from the best gypsy musicians of Badajoz at the theatre tonight. Only two doors down from the hostel, as well. Rats. I’ll be back.

I’d better call it a night there and head on back to the hostel. I might try for sunrise over the Guadiana after this evening’s gorgeous Portuguese sunset. On a final note, I had the happiest moment of the month on the road to Badajoz when I saw, in the distance, a giant V-flock of some one hundred and twenty cranes on their way south. It’s only the very moment I’ve been waiting for, the first true sign of winter in Extremadura. I was practically jumping out of my seat, I was so happy.

The photo hardly does it justice, so I’ll go hunting for them some other time when I’m not stuck on a bus. But that’s an adventure for another day. BB, which may or may not stand for Bird-Brain amongst other things, signing out x

The Wrong Generation

October 12, 2015October 12, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

The feria de El Pilar rages on. The flags are out on the streets now, the King’s on TV saluting the army and Villafranca’s dead quiet for a Monday morning. I’m low on supplies so I’m kind of hoping there’s a market open somewhere, national festival or no. But I’ve wound up in the town centre once again in the seemingly endless quest for WiFi (I seem to have to migrate to a new spot every week) so I thought I’d take a moment to tackle my Achilles’ heel, both out here and in life in general, and that’s my shyness.

Last week in class I did a week’s worth of lessons on personality. It was a lot of fun once they realized it was characters I was after and not physical characteristics, and the results rewarding enough; the youngsters loved to rain praise upon their friends, the seniors jokingly applauded themselves and the teenagers stared blankly, as I guessed they might, unwilling to do one nor the other. I had to spill a lot of personal foibles before some of them opened up a tad. I don’t blame them – at their age I was lovestruck and rather lacking in a personality of my own – but it did highlight for me the glaring hypocrisy of my own handicap, and that is my crippling shyness in the face of certain situations.

I’ll give you some curious examples. I won’t go into a café alone, nor a restaurant for that matter. I still hesitate before knocking on a door, even if it’s the house of a friend, and calling anybody but my parents still has me nervous. Yes, it’s phones, dammit. My worst enemy. The sheer facelessness of it. Like admin, really.

I have no bones about discussing this weakness of mine, just it never really bothers me to talk about anything on a personal level. In the same way, getting up on a stage and singing and dancing has nothing to do with it either. Somehow that’s a different kettle of fish altogether. Going it alone, of course, is a lot easier than when I have the safety of other people around me to rely on should I fall short, which I so often do. But I still won’t brave a café alone. Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t answer that one well if I tried. It just… won’t do.

For the last three nights I’ve been wandering the feria to take in the sights. Usually that’s a case of walking across Pilar district to the fairground rides and back through the stall-lined streets, ogling the turón and other delicacies on display, but neither summing up the courage to buy one, nor to engage in conversation with anybody beyond a friendly wave to my students, who see me long before I see them. There are almost two hundred of them now, remember, it’s not easy to know them all within a couple of weeks! Last night as I was retreating away home I had a streak of luck when one of my senior classes, led by the Flashman-esque Garci, hailed me over and demanded I go with them to dinner and then on to the feria. I relished the opportunity, being in want of company, and we had a merry couple of hours over a pizza at Andy’s, where I picked sides with the Uruguayan waitress over ordering a ‘coca’ instead of a ‘coca cola’; in Spain, ‘coca’ is cocaine, whereas in Uruguay you can use it for a regular Coke. You learn something new every day. We moved on to the rides and sat on the rails of the dodgems, and there things slowly petered out. The music was insane, faster, harder and generally better than anything you might get in an English club. And yet, there we were; sitting on the rails, drinking, talking and staring into the void. I say we, but I should point out that yours truly was standing sober on the grille and finding it very difficult to control his feet.

The simple fact of the matter is that Spaniards, or at least the younger generation, don’t dance anymore.

‘Bailar es otra cosa,’ says one of my students. ‘In Spain, anything more than this…’ – he pumps his fist in a standard weak club move – ‘…is strange. It’s ok for you. You are the foreigner. You do things your way, and the people here let you get away with it because you’re different. But us? No dancing.’

He’s only half true. At half midnight I slipped away and made for home, but along the way I found a live band playing in a packed square. The performers were your bread-and-butter upbeat modern Spanish trio, complete with Latin beats, wildly gyrating hips and a troupe of six year old choreographers getting the crowd hyped. The crowd, as it happens, were my parents’ generation, give or take a few years. And let me tell you, they had no problems shaking what their parents gave them. I danced away a good half hour before the band packed up for home and I called it a night, and I considered it a half-hour very well spent. To think that a crowd of forty year-olds are better company on a dance floor than my own generation is… Well, it’s more disappointing than surprising.

My question is less to Spain but to young folks in general: what happened? Why does nobody dance anymore? Because it’s exactly the same here as it is in Klute, or Lloyds, or wherever. I may have none of the social airs and graces that allow my companions to chat their way into new friends and lovers with such ease, and I doubt I ever will, but dancing – for me, at least – is such a vital means of expression. It’s an art; there are steps you can follow, but it’s so much more fun to be creative and do your own thing. I’m as timid as a mouse in situations that most people wouldn’t bat an eyelid at, but dancing the night away – especially without the comfort blanket of a bellyful of alcohol – seems to put the fear of God into my generation. Why?

Just a thought. For future reference, I know who to go to if I want a good boogie out here. BB x

Celebrity

October 11, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Welcome to Villafranca de los Barros, my home for the next eight months. Bang in the middle of Badajoz. Hub of a roaring trade in wine. A bus and train station that chivvy passing vehicles on their way to larger, busier districts. Population count of about four or five thousand. Englishmen in that count: one.

It’s the Feria de El Pilar this weekend. Spain’s national holiday is coming up this Monday, so naturally the whole world has shut down for the extended weekend. The banks, the bus service, the whole shebang. Everything but the cafés, of course, which are plying a roaring trade. On the north side of town, the barrio El Pilar, there’s rides, stands and stalls of all kinds, more than a few of them manned by out-of-towners. In a couple of hours wandering I spotted a West African, three Peruvians, an Andalusian and a couple of gypsies. The latter you can tell when you hear them speaking Caló, a language I really must try to learn someday. Villafranca suddenly got multiracial. Not that that’s a big deal – we live in a shrinking world – but you tend to notice these things all the more when you live and work in a town like this. But despite this sudden influx, one citizen continues to draw attention wherever he goes.

I teach at two of the five schools in town and a third offer is on the table, should I choose to accept it. That means there’s hardly a family in town I’m not in contact one way or another. It has its ups and downs. I won’t lie, the celebrity status is a pretty good feeling. It’s nice to know that you can hardly go two streets without getting a friendly wave from someone you know. That’s what I applied for, after all. Like I said before, though, it screws over a good night out. After browsing the stalls last night I thought I’d investigate where all the music was coming from, which turned out to be a giant dodgems affair rigged up beside the club/bar Latino. Cue fifteen minutes of ‘¡RAFA!’, ‘Oyé, ¡Benjamín!’ and ‘Acho, ¡es el inglés! ¡El inglés!’. Outside of class I don’t have a problem speaking to them in Spanish – it comes naturally – but I don’t half feel like it’s a kind of pariah celebrity status. What would you think if you were out drinking with your friends and you ran into one of your teachers?

I left them to it. I’d love to investigate that Latino club at some point, but not alone, and not on a night when I could end up dancing in front of half my students. Not a good idea, not in the slightest.

On the plus side, I now officially exist. I have that legendary slip of plasticised green paper that is known as the tarjeta de residencia, a vital piece of ID that differs from my others in that it’s a fifth of the size, covered in plastic and green. Go figure. In previous years, all you needed was your passport and the NIE was yours. This year, for whatever reason, they mixed it up a little, throwing in an empadronamiento into the mix. That’s a housing contract that’s been run by the town hall, filtered through its database and processed into a slip of paper, which you exchange at the police station for the tarjeta de residencia. Easy enough, unless your landlord got the door wrong, which meant chasing him down at his day job, getting him to doctor the contract and racing back to the town hall, there to be informed that they didn’t have the UK, Great Britain or England on their systems. Another reminder of how very odd I must be.

The director and my mentor whisked me back to Almendralejo and the foreign affairs office of the police station, where Antonio behind the desk was just as beleaguered as he was last time, this time with four Russians enquiring after a work permit. It took about half an hour to process the latest administrative details, but eventually he came back smiling with my new card and much patting of the shoulder. Again. Blonde hair does you wonders in some parts of the world, no matter how much I wish I could have been born with my grandfather’s manchego swarthiness.

So that’s the end of that, and with a green card in hand, you know what that means! I’m finally able to open a bank account, some three weeks after arriving! Well now, don’t get your hopes up. It being El Pilar, I can’t actually do that until Monday’s been and gone, and what with my timetable being the way it is, that means the earliest opportunity I’ll get is next Friday. So, until then, that final hurdle, all I can do is wait. A three-day week beckons and the novel’s coming along nicely, so it won’t be too long a delay. I’ll let you know about my first adventure in a separate post, when my thighs have stopped punishing me for walking a good forty-five kilometers in a single morning. Yours foolishly, BB x

Shrinking World

October 5, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I got my new timetable last night, first from the Carmelitas, then from my own school. The end result, as of a few last-minute additions this afternoon, is a twenty-two-hour working week. Not a truckload by regular working standards, but the longest by a yard in my working life so far, and a world away from the twelve-hour maximum we had dangled in front of our faces at the first British Council meeting. So much for that holy four-day weekend! I’m lucky enough to have clung on to three days of freedom, and I had to stick out my neck for that. At the very least they let me have Friday off instead of Monday, which gives me quite a few more days off in the long run, though navigating back to Villafranca on a Sunday is going to cause some headaches, mark my words. Still, I signed up for the back end of nowhere and that’s where they put me. At the very least I’ll not be getting bored here. I don’t have time to get bored. And I haven’t even started on any of the music groups yet…
But hey, there’s thirty kids who now know what a loon is, what it sounds like, and consequently why we say ‘as mad as a loon’. That was an icebreaker and a half.

Teaching at both a state school and a private school gives me the opportunity to take a look into both worlds, and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how very different they are. My main obstacle with the state school kids is getting them to be quiet. Their English is good, but they quickly revert to their mother tongue for argument’s sake. Conversely, my private school pupils have a very high level of English, but they just won’t talk. And in primario, it’s every man for himself. I’m expected to take those classes alone, so it’s a biweekly war with a small army of Spaniards in the making, shouting everything and everybody demanding attention at the same time. The one thing they all have in common is the inevitable ‘do you have a girlfriend?’ interrogation, to which the answer has reduced from ‘not anymore’ and ‘not yet’ to a simple ‘no’. It’s easier that way. It doesn’t stop them changing tack and asking ‘what about boyfriend?’, but hey, at least that’s as far they go. One kid in primario had a particularly unfortunate way of phrasing it this afternoon – are you gay or “normal”? – which I tried to rectify as best I could, Catholic school or no, but I guess it went over his head. On the plus side, I haven’t been hit on by a guy for several months now. It must be a new record. Maybe I’m doing something right! That, or I simply haven’t been going out. Probably the latter.

I’m now in the curious position where I find myself teaching across every conceivable age group, from the rowdy little tykes in primario right the way up to people my own age in grado superior; and then, of course, there’s the private classes for adults in the afternoons on top of that. Teaching kids and adults is one thing, but with students your own age it’s an odd feeling. I guess the real catch is that in a town as small as Villafranca (I remind you that, by my standards, it’s still pretty massive) the chance of getting to know anybody on a non-professional basis is rather slim. I bumped into some of the girls I teach whilst out walking last week and they were adamant that they were going to find me a girlfriend in Villafranca. The trouble is, where does one draw the line? Because, like as not, anybody roughly my age in this town who I don’t teach (a number which shrank even more this afternoon) probably has a sibling I do teach, and that makes things rather complicated. I wouldn’t say no to a Spanish girlfriend – sheesh, who would? – but it’s easier said than done. The auxiliares in Almendralejo, the nearest city, don’t have this problem, as there are plenty of young people there for the job prospects on offer, but here it’s a family town, like I said before. And I’m still very much in that mindset of ‘absolutely no fraternization with the students outside of class’, as I had drummed into me in my last teaching job last summer. Which means if I want to meet people my own age, I’d better check out Almendralejo.

Here at least, I’ve had a stroke of luck. There is another auxiliar placed here in Villafranca, though like more rational minds than mine she chose to base herself in Almendralejo. A bright and beaming button of a Texan. I must have gone berserk speaking English with a native speaker at last after almost two weeks without doing so, but she bore it patiently enough and gave me an insight into Almen life. Apparently there’s a nightlife scene. Who knew? I was beginning to forget what nightlife is. And yes, they abide by Spanish hours; ergo, a far more rational 11pm until 6am mentality. That, at least, makes the possibility of a night out in Almendralejo feasible, as far as buses are concerned, though it’d probably knock out a whole weekend in the process.

All in all it’s been a pretty long day at the office. Those 8:15am starts are very hard on the eye but I’m simply going to have to get used to them. It’s largely thanks to them that I have Friday off. Monday isn’t the longest slog – that’s Wednesday, from 8:15am until 6:30pm with one hour for lunch – but it’s certainly one of the more mixed. I teach a bilingual gestión y acogida class in the morning (essentially, life skills: interviews, CVs etc), then a mid-teens 3º ESO, then I have twenty minutes to walk to the other school and mentally prepare for the chaos of a class of six-year olds, after which I get a free lunch from the nuns (probably the best part of the job) and return to take my final class of the day, a private school version of 3º ESO, before hopping down the road to my private class with my lawyer friend. And thus is a light day.

It’s bonkers. Good bonkers, paid bonkers, but bonkers nonetheless. It’s like last year, but without the music. That’ll come, you just watch. It’s the only thing I’m genuinely missing right now (I sang through the entire Northern Lights set when I was home alone yesterday, until the neighbour told me to shut up. Oops.

So there you have it. Busy, busy, busy – but I’m never truly happy if I’m not truly busy, that’s what I always say! Yet another example of yours truly not knowing when to shut up. So here’s BB, shutting up. BB x

Return of the Paperwork Fiend

October 1, 2015 / Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’ve been riding on an unfairly long streak of good luck for the last week, as you might have guessed by the cheery tone of the articles. As is to be expected, the honeymoon-period had to come to an abrupt end at some point as the stresses of making one’s own way in the world came to a head, and as usual, it’s the little things that take you by surprise. I managed to dodge the iceberg that was the NIE without even a scratch, only to plough straight into the reef that is trying to open a Spanish bank account.

What have the Romans ever done for us? Administration. You’ll hear a lot of horror stories about foreign administration, especially in France and Spain, where the foul creature was spawned long ago. The Spanish love their paperwork, arming themselves with signed forms, photocopies, rubber stamps and enough identity cards to start a national trading-card game. Obtaining an NIE – a numero de identidad de extranjero – is one of the most important parts of enrolling as an auxiliar de conversacion, as without it you cannot open a bank account or be a legal resident in Spain. Normally it’s this that gives most people a bellyache, when pencil-pushing fiends in the foreign affairs office at the local police station decide to liven up the tedium of their day’s work by sending you on a merry wild goose chase after that form that looks just like the one you brought in, but with one number’s difference, which of course changes everything. And of course, you’re not the only one after one of these precious little commodities.

Right now it’s coming up to harvest season and Extremadura is awash with migrant workers here to reap the benefit of a temporary boom in the job market. This year, the officials in Almendralejo have their hands full with a large group of Romanians, also requiring an NIE to validate their existence in this country. If it hadn’t been for the Director and my mentor in the English department, I honestly think I’d have turned back when they told us to return at nine o’clock the following morning. But the sad fact of the matter is that ‘big old whitie’ always prevails, and I was shunted to the front of the queue so that I could leave that very morning with my NIE stamped, cleared and ready to go. There’s something very sick about that system. Guilt aside, it wasn’t as clear-cut as I’d have liked. My landlord hadn’t thought to give me a contract, so I couldn’t apply for my tarjeta de residencia on the spot. That wasn’t too difficult to achieve, but it would have been handy to know in advance, before attempting to tackle the bank this morning – which, of course, needed that precious tarjeta also. Passport, NIE, proof of address and proof of stable financial employment are all well and good, but if you don’t have that little red card – if you’ll forgive the expression – it don’t mean jack.

Did you know that the United States has a Paperwork Reduction Act, dated from 1980? Spain could sure do with something like that.

Following on from this trend, today’s been a bit of a bad luck day all around. My timetable’s still in flux because of the absence of any bachillerato classes, which the authorities decree needs changing. And until that’s done, I can’t clarify the timetable of my second job with the Order of the Carmelites. And since both of those are paid affairs, this bank situation needs clearing up fast, or I’m going to end up high and dry soon enough, Erasmus grant or no Erasmus grant. Don’t even get me started on that.

As a final hurdle, I stumbled just short of the fence over the Jornadas de Formacion in Caceres this morning. My BlaBlaCar driver didn’t show up, the only bus that passes through this town leaves at half four, which is when the training day begins, and I haven’t received a smidgen of confirmation as to whether I’ve actually got anywhere to stay there tonight. So all in all, despite not having fully prepared any classes, I’ve decided to toss that in the towel and start work today. It’s not a major loss, as I’ve had two teaching jobs before and I’ve done half of the paperwork already, the main focus of these meetings. They’re also non-compulsory, so it’s no big deal, but I was hoping to go if just to formalise the whole shebang, though perhaps more so to meet some other auxiliares. I may be a blood traitor to my kin, choosing to eschew any and all English speakers by living with Spaniards way out here in the sticks, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss my mother tongue. At the moment writing is proving my only channel for it, and Hell, is that benefiting from an absence of conversation…! I must have written a chapter a day for the last four days. That’s ten A4 pages a day. I have far too much time on my hands – for now.

How’s that for a healthy antidote to the ‘I’m having the best year of my life on my year abroad’ drawl I’ve been riding on for the last week? Alright, alright, I’ll quit putting myself down so. On the plus side (finally!) teaching’s been really fun, and that’s what I’m here for. My Spanish is improving daily, in vocabulary, grammar (I never did learn the simple past tense at school and I’ve been winging it for the last ten years) and stumble-rate. The latter is, of course, a problem in every language I speak – even English – and has more to do with my machine-gun rate of speech than anything else. Teachers have been telling me to slow down for years. ‘You never will learn, Benjamin’, as my father would say. He’s right on that count.

The shining light in my experience though, above and beyond school, is the couple of hours I spend a week with the husband of one of the staff here, who’s requested extra English lessons. Not only is his English at a much higher level than any of my students, but he’s also one of the most interesting men I’ve ever met: a genuine intellectual if there ever was one, his bookcases lined with legal tomes and a collection of certificates and photographs on his desk, featuring such leading lights as Umberto Eco, King Felipe VI and Mikhail Gorbachev. We had to cut our lesson short yesterday when, mid-meeting, he received an important call from a government official promoting him to high office, a decision which he had been labouring over for some time since it would require a drastic change in his life. He took the job and poured out his heart to me, and I felt more than honoured to be the first person to hear about it; before his wife, children and even his own secretary. ‘I feel like a child at EuroDisney… like a little boy on Christmas Day’. That was how he put it to me. I left him to open his Christmas presents and set off to treasure that warm fuzzy for an hour in the park. It may only be for a couple of hours, but it’s already the highlight of my week.

And there I am, fussing over kids, when the real gem out here is a man older than most of my teaching colleagues. Life has a funny way of playing around with you, sometimes. BB x