Today I spent the day with Rosita, one of Elisa’s close friends who wants to exchange languages with me and who quite possibly is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. She invited me to her house to meet her family and eat Sunday lunch with them. We drank good wine, great coffee, smoked a Cuban cigar and ate like kings a typical dish from Madrid, cocido madrileño, that I’ve never tried before. It’s basically a stew with chickpeas, a few shy vegetables and more or less every type of meat you can possibly think of – cow, chicken, various types of pig, various types of sausages including a kind of blood pudding, and, I’m pretty sure, cow’s hoofs. It was rather tasty, but as I was the guest and it was my first time trying it I received a plate stacked high with great hunks of every kind of thing from the pot. I tried hard, I really did, because as mummy always said, ‘you can’t leave the table until you’ve finished,’ but I actually would have exploded… I managed probably less than half of what I’d been given and then apologised profusely. We nattered away the rest of the day like long-lost friends and went out for a beer before I headed back here, ostensibly to do my marking, but obviously what I’m really doing is writing this.

Just a short one.

We had a little party last night, very riotous, but I was planning on going out to an International language exchange party thing that I found through facebook and I ended up missing it… no worries, there’s always another…

Today I am going to have lunch with Rosita and her family… looking forward to it very much :-D

I have finally got around to uploading a few of my photos from Madrid, eventually I’ll get through lots more but for the time being here are some photos from the day I spent rearranging an artists studio with Elisa and her sisters (as mentioned in this post).

You see me
riding through a field,
fast and slow
high and low,
the sound of the wind
rushes by,
like a plane
flying by,
with hair whistling behind.

by Emily Erskine, Age 10

I’m not sure why I haven’t been blogging recently, I’ve had plenty of things to say, and even could’ve found the time, but somehow all my half-formed blog posts died at some point in the pipeline. So just a few bits and pieces…

I’m now officially a resident of Spain, with my own identity number and everything… the process was, in the end, alarmingly simple… although also the point of the whole thing still escapes me… so I have a number, on a completely impractical sheet of paper, with a stamp – but it isn’t valid unless I carry a passport around with it too, which I’ve been doing anyway, and which has served me well up until now – I was hoping that the whole point would be that I wouldn’t need to keep my passport on me 24/7 anymore. At least I didn’t get my name misspelled as did the fellow teacher who went with me – she’s Belgian and got her name changed to its masculine form (and was also identified as the son of her parents).
Having problems with names is, I think, something you just have to cope with when you’re in a foreign country. For those of you who don’t know, Spaniards have two surnames, one from their father and the other from their mother… when they travel they have great problems with our one name systems, and vice versa… often people just can’t cope with the idea that you’ve only got one, so on my metro travel pass my first name is Barnes and my surnames are John and Mark.

Anyway, last night I went to the cinema. Spaniards dub their films and I’ve been on a mission to find cinemas which show undubbed versions and also art cinemas. With the help of Alba, Elisa’s sister and fellow filmite, and a few students I mentioned it to, I’ve found a couple and last night headed to the Cine Dore, an architecturally amazing cinema (which you can glimpse in Almodóvar’s Habla con Ella) with similarly amazingly cheap tickets (€2.50 / £1.90) I watched a bunch of Spanish shorts, which were on the whole unexceptional, and then Carl Dreyer‘s 1919 (or 1918, depending on who you believe) Præsidenten, a Danish silent film. The print was excellent, although weirdly it was presented without intertitles but instead with Spanish subtitles over the image and completely silently, ie without any music, which was very strange – I’ve never watched a completely silent film… and sitting in a cinema for an hour and a half with just an occasional cough to be heard was an intriguing way to spend a Friday night. Still, the film was enjoyable, beautifully shot – they don’t compose frames like that no more.

We are now finally a foursome in the flat… up ’till now one of the flatmates has been almost continuously absent, only staying here at the weekend a couple of times a month. Now a new guy has moved in, Scottish and also an English teacher, although with what sounds like a much more sensible timetable than me. The best thing about this is that I was running out of books to read again (despite some fun little adventures tracking down secondhand bookshops that stock books in English) and we swapped all the ones we’ve already read, so I have a little pile again.

[image completely unrelated to post]

so then, what’s cooking? Well mainly work, lots of work. The thing is the school is rather in an uproar… well, I guess I need to explain a bit more about how I work…
When I first started I said I wanted a full time contract, which they gave me, under the provision that my hours be split between two different schools because neither had enough hours to give me a full contract on their own. This I did, although in reality up until recently I only had classes with one school, with occasional fill-ins at the other. The last couple of weeks I’ve started having more classes at the second school, which has been interesting. This is mainly because the two schools work very differently – the first has classes almost exclusively offsite, in companies, which means that as teachers, as employees, we are more or less distanced from each other… we meet occasionally dashing between classes, but I wouldn’t say I really know anyone there. The second school has the majority of classes on site, with most of the rest conducted in companies a short walk from the school building. This means that the teachers there are a much tighter group, hanging out together most of the day and socialising outside of it. This has been good, they’re a great bunch of people, and what fun we’ve had playing raucous pictionary, laughing about perineums, moaning about pregnancies… you know, everyday stuff… however, all is not well. Most of the other teachers there have been around for a lot longer than me, and are based there rather than the other school, and they haven’t been treated very well by the company – there are a number of issues, one of which being the same ridiculous working hours that I suffer from – the upshot is that in the last week or so three teachers have quit the job, to pursue less lucrative but more relaxed work as classroom assistants. What this means for the rest of us remains to be seen – they’re finishing out the month – I don’t know if other teachers have been found or if we’ll be landed with even more classes. I suspect at least a portion of the later. I must say the career change is a tempting one, one of the main reasons being that though the money is less, not really enough, it frees up the evenings for giving lucrative (and inexhaustible) private evening classes. I don’t know right now what I’m thinking… I shall wait and see what happens at the beginning of next month, but well, the ol’ cogs are turning….

So, here you go… stage two re-design.
I was, right up until the last minute, going for a very spanish yellow and orange scheme, but then I got bored and decided to go ludicrous colours… so here you are.
At some point I’m going to find the time to sit down and properly hack out my own theme from the ground up (this is a hacked-together modification of the default theme) until that point, this is what you got…

so, someone expressed interest in whether my ideas for videos make it onto paper, and the truth is it’s very variable – but I thought you might be interested in seeing what goes on before I make something. The truth is it’s very variable from project to project – sometimes an idea will just pop into my head, I’ll start working on it and as I do so it takes shape, at others I spend a lot of time working the whole thing out on paper. This never really takes the form of fully fledged storyboards, partly because I’m not a very good draughtsman, and partly because I don’t find them particularly useful. Anyway, above you can see my notes for what I’m working on at the moment (which’ll probably be finished in a couple of weeks) and in case you want to compare the initial notes to a finished product, below is a link to my planning for the Zebra Puzzle Eh? short that I made, which you can watch here.

Babybel is the official cheese of Real Madrid.

My flatmate ran up a €469 phone bill downloading porn.

One of my new classes is working in McDonald’s, teaching three complete beginners English before they go to various conferences and what-have-you in clearly too short a time to learn much of significance. Now, it must be said, I have something of an anti-corporate past, I have, indeed, organised demonstrations outside McDonald’s restaurants, even, on occasion, dressed as a bloody clown festooned with the gory body-parts of children, so obviously this job doesn’t sit so well with me. The truth is, of course, that I can’t afford not to do it, and sooner or later we all prostitute ourselves one way or another. I’m not proud of what I’m doing. Maybe, however, there’s a chance to do some damage from the inside.
Interestingly one of my students is Ronald McDonald, or at least (one of?) the actors who plays the face of McDonald’s in Spain (and artistic director for its advertising here. He’s learning English before going, believe it or not, to a conference of clowns in Chicago. I’ve been sworn to ridiculous blood pacts of secrecy not to reveal his name but, you know, just think what havoc I could wreak inside this behemoth by letting slip such a dark and vital corporate secret…

Well, here you go… a little redesign for you. You should also find that the embedded videos work now.

It’s not much yet, but at least it’s not blue. This is step one… next step is to make it look more snailsnaily, also there are some inconsistencies and horrible formating and what have you, I’m sure you can bare with if for now.
Now I’m going to try an prepare some classes then maybe I’ll watch a film and do some knitting or read a book who knows.

aha! bingo!
skype and apache don’t play well together… problem solved, let development recommence…

So the day went well, project going smoothly, you’ll start to see the fruit in a few days I expect.
The redesign going less well… anybody got any ideas how I can get XAMPP to behave itself? No, thought not, oh well…

Part I Part II

and to round us off a short one…

07.01.2008 carry on with drawings reading and knitting project elisa pops round in the evening for a brief goodbye before flying back to peru we drink a little mate and have a goodbye hug I shall miss her enormously spend the evening with nacho eating nuts and playing trivial pursuit in spanish still manage to win though 08.01.2008 first day back at work and first day with new mcdonalds group bunch of characters interesting teaching beginners mcdonalds branded office supplies quite comical giant clown poster on wall get ripped off for new pair of glasses it’ll be a lean month and make the first stabs at my new grand project 09.01.2008 first 12 1/2 hour day absolutely knackered 11.01.2008 nice easy friday only two hours of classes come back find laptop arrived great hard drive been whipped even though they needn’t have not so great oh well spend rest of day getting things sorted out 12.01.2008 first major day on the grand project stop writing diary cook prawns dont answer any emails

Part I Part II