It's exam time so a number of students are busy preparing and a few classes are coming to an end (one student, whose mother appears to be the driving force behind her, is doing the US SAT and the TOEFL exams in the next couple of weeks).

So my hours are going down a little. The director called me into here office last week and said she had a new class for me to try, because she had no other teachers. This is not a good beginning, a class because there's no one else?

Seven year olds.

A class of four seven year olds.

"It fun teaching them," The director said. "You'll enjoy it."

We should always try new things, so I nodded and said I'd give it a go but that she shouldn't expect great things."Don't you like children?" She asked. "It's not that," I said, "I just have nothing in common with them." "You just need to have a sense of humour." "I do. It's a very English one, based on sarcasm and wordplay..."

There are good books and CDs and all sorts to use but I thought it was terrible, we had singing along in English, we had me trying to explain what was about to happen in bad spanish and them not understanding. It's not my best kind of teaching.

The director said the kids told their mothers I was majissimo (very nice) and I said I wouldn't be teaching them any more (because it's my choice). She nodded and then said she needed me to do it again this week, just one more time.
  ¶ 6:36 PM 3 comments

  "There will be pinchos up to here" Julio said, gesturing up to his chin. This sounded pretty good because pinchos are the bar-top sandwiches we normally have for breakfast on the walks. However this was after our breakfast stop (in which a coach load of hungry Spaniards descend on a solitary barman and demanded coffees and pinchos) so perhaps pinchos had another meaning.

Gorse.

It's another word for gorse and there was a lot of it. We waded through pathless gorse for at least three hours, maybe more. With thin trousers it was quite painful after the first hour.

The walk this weekend was supposed to have great views but it was pretty much cloud and drizzle all day. And the path we followed (a low level alternative in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid the cloud) was a little overgrown. Julio and Pompayo had hoces (sickles on long sticks) and spent a long time hacking away at trees and bushes while we queued behind.

It wasn't the best walk we've ever done but the small glimpses of the oak filled mountains of the Muniellos nature reserve suggest that it'll be definitely worth a return visit

We had baths when we got back... the gorse exfoliation made Liz yelp when she got in... gaiters are on the list for tomorrow's shopping.  ¶ 12:00 PM 0 comments

  Along the paseo de los alamos (the boulevard in front of the park) there are a number of art nouveau style ice cream stalls. In the past month a few of them have changed their spots and started sporting 'castañas asadas' signs. It's chestnut season and, much like in the UK, a bag of roasted chestnuts is a fine autumn treat.

The old ladies in the outdoor bit of the market (the part where the local smallholders come in to sell whatever they have) is a good bellwether of the current state of veg. Things are turning green, not so many figs now, not so many lettuce or tomatoes. Now it's more in the way of kale, cabbage and greens. But they all have a tray or two of chestnuts (and apples and pears still). Liz prefers to get her chestnuts from one particular old lady who looks about 300, thin and crooked with a deep lined face that suggests a lifetime of hard work. She stands a little apart from the other sellers, under a tree, next to her tartan shopping trolley and her only goods for sale. A mountain of chestnuts. Liz asked for half a kilo and she 'misheard' and sold us a kilo, but that was okay because they were delicious.
  ¶ 11:03 AM 0 comments

  The other day Liz came back from the supermarket, I had rustled something up from the veg in the kitchen and some meatballs from the market.

"I got the expensive wine today"

Oh? I asked, how much?

"€1.80"

We have both noticed people buying cheap wines in the supermarket, but there's an inbuilt aversion, it seems, to buying wine that would be less than £1.50 a bottle. So many other people can't be wrong (well, they can of course, but when it comes to wine the risks are pretty small). So: Liz had spotted one of the neighbours buying a couple of bottles of this €1.80 wine and decided to have some too. And it was pretty good. Admittedly the meatballs had more garlic in than a garlic factory on garlic delivery day, so our taste buds might not have been in the very best of tasting condition, but the wine went down pretty well.  ¶ 7:30 PM 1 comments

  Now that Liz is here, we have resumed our ongoing project to find the best lunch menu in town. It's a difficult project but the rewards are excellent. On Friday (for the unwritten rules state that we can only do lunch one day a week, for wallet and waist related reasons) we tried a bar just round the corner, called Punto y Coma (full stop and comma: not anything to do with comas). I give a class at 3:30 on Fridays so we polled up at just before 2. This was a smart move because the tables were empty. Despite that, a lot of them had reserved signs so we ended up in the bar area rather than the restaurant. This wasn't a bad thing, it let Liz examine the packed bar. Now, when I say packed bar, in Spain that seems to mean one deep, everyone with access to the bar itself, using it to rest their wine glasses, their plates of nuts, crisps, olives and hams, rather than an English packed bar which is basically a chaotically formed queue. Liz remarked on how well coiffed the ladies were and how smartly dressed everyone was (look at the shoes!!). We thought about this for a few minutes before figuring out that we were just round the corner from the centre of government of Asturias, and that this was probably the local for the local politicos and their staff.

The food was excellent, I started with callos with chickpeas... callos is a specific type of tripe, not something I'd normally go for, but hey... if you never try new stuff... Apparently this combination is typical in Madrid, the Asturians have a different serving method we'll get to in the future. It was lovely, the tripe was in very small pieces so rather than rubbery, it melted in the mouth. Liz had a tuna and rice salad that came formed into a cube. Then Lubina (no idea what it translates as but it's fish) while I tucked into chicken with garlic. My poor students... there was a ton of garlic, even the accompanying chips had a garlic flavour. After that we had a cream cheese with quince jelly dessert, and coffee. All for €10. At about nine that night Liz said 'where shall we go next week?'
  ¶ 7:03 PM 2 comments

  Well, after the ease of my initial brush with Spanish beaurocracy, Liz didn't have such a simple time of it. She needed a social security number to get a contract to work legally. The academy's accountant prepared the form and the director gave it to her and told her where to take it. At the social security department she was told she'd need an empadronamiento, and directed her to the appropriate building. This sent us scurrying to the dictionary.

The empadronamiento is the piece of paper saying that you're recorded in the padron, the electoral roll or the census. Now I didn't have to do that (for whatever reason... I'm not sure why not) but Liz, being dutiful, and needing her social security number, headed off to see the wizard, sorry, the census bloke. Who promptly told her that she needed to show him the contract from the flat to empadronarsela (to 'encensus' her). The contract on our flat had run out so we emailed the landlady and told her the situation, asking for a new contract.

The landlady was not impressed. She was very clear in her desire for us not to show a contract to the council, citing a friend, who had had nothing but trouble since this had happened to her. Reading between the lines, I guess she's not paying certain taxes that she ought to be paying. Which is not uncommon, according to my payslips over the summer I wasn't being paid as much as I actually was. She said we only needed something proving our address, like a gas bill or something.

So we wandered back to the council bloke and I took along my social security receipts, my medical registration, my foreigner's certification, all of which had the address on. The bloke didn't seem like he was going to accept any of them, and kept saying we needed a bill or a contract, we kept pleasantly saying we didn't have them and these had our addresses and smiling like idiots. Eventually he gave in and stamped the form (twice), before printing out the two empadronamientos, stamping each of them and signing them in the margin (otherwise they're not valid).

Then Liz had to go back to the social security place and get them to get the number, but this time it worked flawlessly.  ¶ 8:02 PM 1 comments

  Winter has arrived. The forecasters seemed relieved that, after weeks of talking about storms in the South, they can get on and talk about proper weather, or, as they say with a gleam in their eyes, rain in the north. The cold front that came down from the UK earlier in the week brought rain and snow here too. Snow down to 800m, which is enough to close a good few roads and let TV reporters do their standing in front of weather stuff.

Although, it does seem to go to far. They spent ten minutes interviewing people the other day, all of whom basically said 'it's bloomin' freezing' in that surprised tone of voice I used to think was particularly British (Snow! who knew, I mean we had some last year and the year before that but I thought it would be different this time around... ).

The market stalls have added scarves to their massive selections of umbrellas, and Liz is knitting like a woman posessed (admittedly like a woman possessed by a knitting demon, possibly named Ethel). Still, the rain isn't accompanied by much wind, which makes umbrellas less of challenge than they'd be in the UK, and they say the temperatures will be going up next week too.  ¶ 7:48 PM 0 comments