In a short while I shall be on a plane again heading back to Madrid and hence a computing black hole. Hopefully I shall be here with you again in the not too distant future, in the meantime I wish you all very well, have a grand New Year’s my friends.
Ciao.

Well Christmas and Boxing Day are almost over and we sit as a family, laptopped to a person, around the dying embers of the fire I built. Left is a photo of the traditional Christmas morning stocking opening together on my parent’s bed. I’m banned these days from sitting on the bed after an unfortunate incident a few Christmases ago. Today we went, sans Sarah, for a little Boxing day stroll along by the sea in Seasalter. It was a beautiful day and I dusted off my SLR for the first time in over a year and, with a lens borrowed from Dad, took a few snaps.

My complete lack of luck with technology is an ongoing frustration to me – in addition to my tragically suicided laptop, both of my cameras have been playing up and the mp3 player I got for Christmas is refusing to do the one thing I chose it for – properly deal with .ogg files.

Welcome to the new place for the blog – http://madrilenoinglesito.snailsnail.com/
With luck we’ll get things looking pretty to in the not too distant future. We’ve got a few plugins and things to sort out to.Toby, who runs my server for me, has been putting in far too many hours over Christmas to make this happen, so mad props the him. Also, if you find any problems I’d love it if you emailed me about them.

Hope you’re all having great holidays!

I’m very sorry to all and sundry about my slackness of posting, basically I’m rubbish. In anycase in the time I’ve been gone I’ve had a few little adventures and finally arrived back in beautiful old Herne Bay for the Christmas season. So a very merry Christmas to you all. Enjoy it with good cheer. Here’s what I made to celebrate being back…
(more…)

Sorry for the hopeless posting recently… it’s going to continue I’m afraid as my laptop has bitten the dust – fairly finally I think.
Oh well, there’s loads of stuff to report, and no time to report it in, sufficed to say that with Eli here I’ve been very busy, numerous nights out, meeting up with friends old and new, sampling culinary delights, etcetera etcetera. Looking forward to coming back to the bay next Sunday, hopefully I’ll be able to see as many of you as possible in my short days back and wish you the best of the season.
Until next time then, goodnight.

So tonight after work I went with Elisa and Alba to see some improvised theatre by a Mexican trio.
Yeah… judging by the crowd it was funny, but I got pretty lost with all but the simplest jokes passing me far behind. Despite not understanding they were obviously very good, riffing off each other and working very well from the random phrases submitted by us as we entered. My phrase: "Los cuatro principios de marketing" (I’m probably insulting your intelligence by translating this but, "The four principles of marketing") came straight from the English class I’d just finished teaching and did get picked out of the hat, though it didn’t get the biggest laugh. I do interestingly find it rather hard to disengage after a lesson and so spend a lot of time with arcane business mumbo jumbo flapping and sqwarking against this inside of my skull.

I finished reading an awesome book today, All The Names by José Saramago, which I bought for my mum a while back and then pilfered. It’s taken me ages to read because, basically, I’m really slow these days. I love the way it’s paced, progressing very very slowly as the author spends his time pontificating about, for instance, the precise meanings of common idioms (I’d like to know how some of these sections have been translated) then suddenly hurtling through barely punctuated dialogues so that I often find myself having to backtrack as the text has thrown me ahead of myself. The book wonderfully catches the grinding of a blind oppressive bureaucracy and the souls worn down by its gears but at the same time gradually builds towards a series of elevated themes and images at its end.

And what this means in a wider sense is that I’ve now run out of English reading material… emergency aid parcels greatly appreciated… no, really I’m on a quest to find a bookshop here that stocks works in English.

Hey all you beautiful kids who helped out in my film project. I finally got my feedback for it today, very kindly posted to me here in Spain, and here’s a piece for you:

"… the standard of naturalness achieved from the actors was impressive, particularly given the often challenging subject matter they were articulating…"

Thank you all once again! I told you you all did a sterling job, and the markers thought so too :-D

If I’m cold should I:

a) Turn the heating on,
b) Put on a jumper,
c) close the window?

After my last post I completely failed to get to sleep so thought I’d try to make something more of my Sunday morning and so went to El Rastro, a massive flea market that takes over a number of streets with a bedlam of randomness every Sunday morning. There are plenty of stalls selling clothes and jewelry and whatnot, but the fun’s to be had in its darker regions which are full of stalls selling, basically, any old rubbish… assorted junk and knickknacks strewn on sheets on the ground from half-mauled ancient children’s toys to ancient car-phone bricks to brass (possibly) torture devices to doors (actual massive old wooden doors still in frames apparently been hacked from their houses) and really anything you can imagine – nazi memorabilia, collectable pornographic comics, Bakelite telephones, suits of armour. Awesome. (Photos here, because I couldn’t be bothered to take any)

I stumbled home around 11 completely exhausted and slept for most of the rest of the day. In the evening Elisa picked me up and we went out with some old friends to a Moroccan bar for teas and water pipes. Rosita, one of Elisa’s friends known through previous visits to Madrid and Bangor, and I have agreed to be language partners and meet up to teach each other, which is a great idea… something I need as the school is slacking in giving me the Spanish classes they promised.

I’ve kind of lacked in posts these last few days because I keep writing them but they turn into long rambling musings on the nature of language and become essentially unpublishable. So, what’ve I done? Well I’ve had lots of students not turn up for classes, I’m trying to make Saturdays my cultural days, but yesterday was another public holiday so nothing was open. Instead I took a long slow walk around Retiro, a lovely park I’ve been to a number of times before, and the surrounding streets. I don’t remember quite so many drug dealers around the last time I was there, although maybe I just didn’t notice them, not that they’re hard to notice when they walk up to you and ask you what you want. On the more electronic front I finished off the track that I used for my New Model Experiment video and you can find it on my Noise Works page if you should so wish. You can also download [mp3 link, 6MB] it.

I’m up this ridiculously early because I met Elisa at the airport, she’s back from Peru for Christmas and it’s awesome to see her again after nearly a year, may the high-jinx ensue!

In my high-intermediate class today we encountered this sentence:

“The women may have cornered the market on transcendent stars, melodramatic feuds and sudsy subplots.”

What did I get up to on my day off? Well, I’m afraid to report that I was boring and spent it learning more After Effects. Here is the result of my experiments:

You can now download both this, and the last Zebra one, in their full resolution glory. If you should so wish (they do look a lot better) then I suggest you do so at their archive.org pages: http://www.archive.org/details/snailsnailNewModelExperiment_0 and http://www.archive.org/details/snailsnailZebraPuzzleEh_

Today I had my first class with kids and it was quite fun. To be honest I’d rather be working with kids, but I came too late, after the start of the school term, so I’m just getting a few filling in classes with them. It went pretty well today – until they figured out that I was covering, and then they went a little crazy… which I seem to remember was what we did at school when we had covering teachers – so no hard feelings. I felt humbled by the fact that these (I guess) 12/13 year-olds speak much better english than I do spanish :(
Afterwards I had a class with a guy who is fast becoming my favourite pupil. He stands out because he’s the only person I teach (or indeed know) who is the same age as me. He’s a programmer working for BT and we spent this lesson geeking out about linux and badmouthing Macs. When I asked him (as part of the lesson plan) what kind of problems one encounters at work, he gave me a lesson in querying oracle databases. Tomorrow is a public holiday here so nothing to do… also I got my first pay cheque today… wooohoo!

A strange habit I’ve fallen into recently – flushing the toilet while still upon it.

I didn’t have any students for my evening class today so I took the opportunity to wander into the centre of Madrid where, in the Plaza Mayor – one of the big tourist places and kind of historically significant – there’s a Christmas market which is a sight to behold. Spaniards take their nativity scenes very seriously and the market has to be seen to be believed, consisting, as it does, of endless stalls selling almost nothing but figures for nativities. Not that they stick to the basic Mary, Joseph, Shepherds, etc, but countless models of farm animals, vegetables?!, and enough buildings to reconstruct a miniature version of Bethlehem seven times over, including blacksmiths with simulated flames flickering in the forge, working water wheels, fake rocks and so on and so forth. What’s weird is that every stall seems to stock basically exactly the same things, there are a few marginally different styles, and a wide range of scales, one stall may have a few more detailed buildings, one a wider selection of farm animals, but really there’s not much to differentiate them. Even weirder though, apart from the stalls selling Christmas trees around the edge of the square, there is only one other type of stall – every fourth one stocks a wide variety of joke products – Halloween masks, knives with retractable blades, fake walnuts, blood, whoopee cushions, etc – again with almost no differentiation in products between stalls.
I spent a full hour wandering around being perplexed.

I think the Plaza look pretty good though, in its Christmas regalia (blurry photo alert):

Yesterday I got a letter from Social Security here welcoming me into my Spanish tax paying status. It made me laugh quite a lot:

"Dear Friend" it starts, "… welcome… [to] the Social Security system, a system that every day has greater reason to thank the efforts of millions of people like you… fundamental to our state of well being… solidarity between generations… between workers and employers…"

Etcetera. A whole page of gushing loveliness.

Man… now I really feel a part of something wonderful.

Also, I have a little Picasa album where I’m starting to upload my Madrid fotos… slowly but surely:

http://picasaweb.google.com/snailsnail/SnailsnailEnMadridNovember2007Whenever

Abrazos a todo.