back to the "real" world

since returning from peurto over a week ago, i have been quite a busy lady. (most fervent apologies for not keeping up with the blog as a result. i know many of you have jobs you don't want to do!!!) first of all, i have set up 2 more private classes for myself, putting my hours outside of school to just about 10 hours a week! it took some major engineering of my schedule but luckily one of the moms was cool and was willing to work with me so it is going to work out. i will meet one of my new students today in fact. it's kind of like im working for a living now or soemthing. my schedule is starting to look like it did before, full of apointments and to-do lists. wednesdays for example i am literally booked from 8am until 9pm.

i have been worrying a bit lately that with all of this work teaching english, and thus speaking english all the time, that i am not speaking enough spanish. this was getting frustrating because improving my spanish is my whole point in being here. to help remedy this though, i have set up and intercambio, or basically a language exchange with noelia's sister who needs to use english for her job. Macarena is really great and we are not meeting twice a week. she is great to practice with because not only is she patient, but my spanish kicks her english's ass so i feel much more comfortable and less embarressed of the state of my spanish.
Macarena is so sweet that she even texted me to go meet her and a few of her freinds for a beer on saturday night but i was already in route to a party with some other freinds. the party was put on my 2 girls at are in my same teaching program and it was mostly americans, spackled with varied europeans and of course a healthy dose of spaniards. that night we acgtually ended up adopting a little passle of euros because a guy in our program that we are freinds with had brought 8 freinds and had NOT made an sort of hostal reservation, assuming they would just stya out all night. although that plan does often work, by 5am at a club well across town from where they were theoretically planning to crach on the floor, the few that had managed to stay out that late were getting pretty tired, so maggie and i kindly offered our futon. i beleive we had a scottish girl, an irish guy and a belgian as well. they all teach in san lucar and have invitied us to visit anytime.

what else... well of course my little gypsies... they are doing fairly well! we have moved into making actual sentences in english now, instead of just learning vocab. we are currently working on prepositions and pronouns , ex: "where is juan? HE is ON the table." also, i am putting the ol' psychology major and experience working with ABA to good use by creating a token economy system for reinforcing learning and good behavior!!! i even set up a special adapted version for my oh-so-special juan herredia. (thats my 11 year old with the extreme ADD, and meriad other behavioral issues who also can't read. he's a treat.) but yeah, juan go his first sticker today, i was stoked. he chose the one that said "super!" for his token sheet, and one that said "great!" for himself.

ok, if i am going to get my essential tuesday afternoon siesta in i'd better get to it.
i hope you are all happy healthy and generally doing fabulous.
beso fuerte,
MC

first week back at school and a most excellent weekend..... (this post has been in draft form for over a week!!!)

after more or less getting over jet lag i had my first day back with my little darlings about a week ago now. they were only mild to medium badly-behaved. last week i started working with them on questions and answers such as what is your name, how old are you, where are you from, and what is your favorite color, food etc. copying and studying these things was not terribly interesting for them, so i said that they better study because a special person was coming to interveiw them and was only going ask in english. after a while i realized that i HAD no special person, other than myself. so, i told them that my "twin sister", a famous interviewer in the united states, with her own television program (that can only be viewed in the US, haha). i fabricated a story about having to go to the airport to pick up said twin sister and after recess noelia brought them to a different room where i had changed my clothes and tried to make myself look as much like a glamorous famous interviewer as possible. at first they were veeeery skeptical, but after a while of trying to ask me questions in spanish, they bought it! well some of them did, the others are clever enough to tell that i am a horrible liar and could see that my not being able to keep a straight face meant that was indeed not my famous twin. wether they fell for my rouse or not, the goal was definitly accomplished, they asked and answered the questions we learned in english. hoooray.
link to my Orripo album where you can see all of my little darlings:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mclauerman/Orripo



This weekend we went down to El Puerto to visit our dear freind Hayley and to celebrate her birthday! We arrived Friday and went over to her freind fernando´s house ( amgio essspecial.... weeeee! jeje me mates? bueno, no importa!) who has a an oven to bake her a proper american birthday cake. the two of them attempted this the night before but the foam-like discs that resulted had a taste very reminicent of glue. evidently they were in desperate need of a clever and domestically inclinded (HAHA) woman such as myself. anyway after a while of eyeballing and making meteric conversions in our heads, the second time around the cake turned out to be lovely.

much to lydia´s schegrin, (Germans do NOT celebrate birthdays, or even say happy birthday on days OTHER than the actual birthday. none of this stretching it out for 3 weeks business, no. so strict, the germans) we started celebrating on saturday (her bithday was on sunday) first with a lovely breakfast at a cafe right on the beach. maggie said she wanted to take my picture and send it to all of her freinds because i was wearing a tank top, on the beach, in january. (she is from wisconsin, its evidently like 20 below there or something.) we continued the revelry with a tradional spanish lunch wih food typical of the region -- all manners of fried fish. so good! there were 10 of us, a feat to sit a one table, and we had not only good food and cerveza but also good company. and later of course we had the tradtional american birthday party at hayley's apartment. (by tradtional i only mean that there was a cake with candles and the american happy birthday song accompanying the booze.) we did the spanish proud and danced the night away in el puerto well into the light of the next day. we returned to sevilla tired and happy :)

ella ha vuelto

si, estoy en España otra vez!

it took me a little longer than expected to get here... there was a little hurricane at SFO on Friday which but a bit of a crimp in my travel plans. Luckily, once I figured out that there was no way I was making my connection I managed to convince the nice airport lady that I did NOT want to spend any night in Philidelphia, so the next available flight out of SFO was not until Monday. This was a slight bummer for a few reasons: 1) my suitcase was checked to Madrid so even though I was tapping out of travelling for the weekend, it was going to Madrid without me. 2) I wanted to be back in Spain before Jan. 6 because it is Reyes Magos, the day that Spaniards exchange presents, have a parade and really party for Christmas. 3) My freinds Maggie and Hayley were waiting for me with Magos party plans. BUT the pros were obvious: another weekend with my beloved family! and I just did not have the physical strenghth to battle a very angry airport chuck-full with frustrated people.

So I set out o Monday for real, it had stopped raining, and all went about as smoothly as possible. I arrived on Tuesday and basically slept until Wednesday evening, only leaving the house to pick up a pollo asado for dinner. Thursday I managed to be more useful, did errands, cleaned the house and went to tutor my high school boys. The older one, Miguel, who is 16, won a scholarship to go study in London for two weeks this spring! I am so proud of him! We spent our whole class talking about the kind of guitar he wanted to find in London. ( He is VERY into guitars, has his own band, etc. ) So I got a lesson about every different kind of guitar and the differences between each, only having to occasionally correct his grammar and give him new vocabulary. A win-win. I also went jogging again, I beleive for the first time since the hambuger incident. I was a little nervous, and I still felt like people were looking at me funny but I arrived back home, unscathed. When I consulted Javi, the younger boy that I tutor, he confirmed that people are looking at me because it IS weird to go jogging in Spain, so if I was going to run around like a weirdo, I was just going to have to deal with the stares, so there.

Today I still have not gotten over this pesky jet-lag! Mags and I went out last night, and I have been sleeping all day long! I need to force myself to stay up during the day to finally get back on this schedule. I just had some breakfast at 6pm, on California time! It's ok, I still have the weekend to get over it.

Ok, just wanted to update to let everyone know that I have made it back, safe and sound.
Beso,
MC