Episode 2: I no speak español

Well this is weird, I’ve spent the whole week speaking to Carme, the other teachers, and people round town in Spanish and Catalan, and even Italian a couple of times, then I start in the school where the kids are told “solo habla inglés.” So not only does this mean not speaking Spanish while in the classroom, it means having to sit there looking blank while the teacher (which this term will mostly be Carme) says something to the children, okay she mostly speaks to them in Catalan so my understanding genuinely is quite low, but I’m picking it up like nothing else, and when she doesn’t speak in Catalan it’s in English, so I’m allowed to understand XD. Then come the questions from the children, who like to revert to Spanish (or castellano) when they don’t know their question in English, so I’ll be asked “¿Qué es tu equipo favorito?” And just as I’m about to answer I’ll hear “¡chicos, en inglés!” Oh that’s right, I don’t speak Spanish, so I did not understand a word of your question. And then one that really threw me off my feet: “what Spanish words do you know?” Crap, think fast! “Well I know, hola, adiós, bueno, sí, no, and cerveza por favor.” “And I’ve been to Spain about 10 times *uh-oh, someone’s who’s been to Spain 10 times should really know more Spanish than I claim to know* but they were all holidays in resorts where everyone speaks English anyway, which is why I don’t know so much Spanish.” My pronunciations have proved quite useful though, when I told them I like David Guetta I was asked “You like the song Tee-tan-ee-um?” “Tee-tan-ee-um?” “Yes, it is a David Guetta song.” It took me about 30 seconds to figure out she was on about Titanium.

Saturday was a pretty strange day, it started off with a lie-in til 12 (we haven’t reached the strange part yet just FYI) and a pretty lazy afternoon. Then I fired up the computer to listen to Town’s match and it seems that the website takes the time from your computer but forgets time zones, given that English kick-offs for me are now at 4PM, so at 2:55 my time it’s telling me there’s 5 minutes to kick-off, not that it affected the stream in any way and that’s the important thing, but I had to leave because Carme had invited me to watch her son’s hockey match which started at half 4, so I left the match at 0-0 and went to watch the hockey. Now I know two types of hockey: ice hockey as in the NHL where there’s more padding than a Superbowl and dentists get rich, and the kind played on Astroturf with a ball and only the goalkeeper wears any real protection, the third kind I discovered today involves a sports hall type surface, a ball, rules much more akin to ice hockey (sans the fighting), and rollerblades. Yes, rollerblades, I saw this and I’m all WTF, and even stranger is the scoring: as opposed to counting goals, it’s a first-to-two in terms of how many 10-minute periods you win, Amposta unfortunately lost in both senses, they were 1-1, 1-2 and 1-3, but back to football-related matters, I knew that between me leaving and getting back we’d made it 2-1 so I went back expecting to calmly see out the rest of the match, that is, until I loaded the stream again to hear “it’s a penalty! Kay’s gone and pulled him back in the area and the referee had no choice!” Fuck. So that’s me on edge again, until Mousinho skies it of course :D final score 2-1 and we’re now 3^rd having played more games than just about anyone else in the division. So 9PM approaches and I decide I’m hungry and can’t be arsed buying anything in, so not knowing any recipes involving tomatoes, lettuce and orange juice I went out and found a place called Bon Gust, the starter salad was pretty standard: mixed leaves, tomatoes, red onion, then chorizo, jamón Serrano, tuna and cheese, it was actually quite a plateful. Then I had a main course of sausages with whatever garnición is, it turned out to be scrambled egg with mushrooms, a sort of sweet, spicy tomato sauce, what looked like fried sliced avocados, something similar only orange…and CHIPS! And I don’t mean “we read about these in an English cookbook, but we just can’t get it right” chips, I mean “did you order these in from a chippy in Yorkshire?” chips, they genuinely were that good, it was all I could do not to ask for salt and vinegar. Then came the dessert menu, it’s quite safe to say that this was the only thing I have ever seen or will ever see that was in Catalan, English and French, there was not a single word of Spanish on that menu, well, barring the odd Catalan word that happens to be the same in Spanish. Oh and did I mention that the salad, main course, dessert, a beer and a coffee afterwards came to 18€?

So yeah, that was my Saturday, one of the more surreal ones but probably one of many.