Christmas in Madrid

Its mid December and Christmas has finally settled in Madrid. The un-hurried, leisurely constuction of temporary markets and festive displays has been completed. Plazas are now congested with an unbelievable array of tatty christmas decorations and kitsch toys, and the christmas lights, flicked on unceremoniously last week, twinkle brightly for an energy-efficient, budget-friendly six hours every evening.

Despite the deceptively laid-back build-up, there is nothing quite like the crazy carnival that is Christmas in Madrid - albeit the city´s festivities are more fitting for Halloween or April Fools Day than for Father Christmas. Santa Claus hats have been replaced by ridiculous wigs more suitable for 60s rockers than St. Nick, mince pies have been swapped for blocks of turrón and steaming cups of mulled wine are nowhere to be seen. Similarly, the christmas jingles lovingly recycled annually on British radio, though often a trigger of weary grumbles about premature christmas cheer at home, are poignantly absent here. For me, the old adage ´There´s no place like home´ has never been truer.

However, strange as it is, the inevitable pangs of pre-Christmas homesickness have been accompanied by a new-found appreciation for the spanish perspective. For example, in sharp contrast to the furious Christmas marketing drive of shops in England, it is refreshing that in Spain, amidst the frenzied, pre-Christmas spending, not even the leading department stores, primely located in shopping hotspots, will consider opening their doors before 10am.

There is clearly reason behind the shops opening hours. Madrid stays up late and wakes up slowly. When you stroll through the centre at night, be it Sunday or Friday, 9pm or 5am, the city is always a hive of activity. In contrast, in the morning the centre is like a ghost town, sparsely scattered with a few newspaper vendors and jaded party-goers from the night before. In fact, when walking to work last Saturday morning, I was accosted by a persistent morrocan intent on selling me marijuana. He had clearly mistaken me for someone on their return from a night on the town rather than a professional on route to work (a sad testament to my appearance early in the morning).

By the afternoon the city has risen from slumber and the central plazas throng with crowds. Locals wait in a long, winding line to buy lottery tickets from kiosks, keen shoppers jostle through the streets laden with bags, and lengthy queues outside gather the main museums. Parque del Retiro, the city´s treasured green space, is also humming with activity by the afternoon. Market vendors, street performers and palm readers line the main promenade, roller-bladers and skaters make loops around the roundabouts, runners puff their way around the perimeter and police horses patrol the main monuments.

Blessed with weather where rain is an outside possibility and sunshine is expected, spaniards of all ages make the most of being outside, be it crisp and cold or warm and summery.This weekend, when running through the rustic reds and golds of Retiro beneath crisp blue skies, I passed an assembly of well-dressed pensioners playing bowls with a slab of slate and a crumpled can of Pepsi. Although unable to understand their gruff, incomprehensible spanish, I occasionally heard a trademark ´¡Ole!´ after a successful shot.

It is promising that, despite longing for christmas festivities with family and friends, mince pies and mulled wine, I am still being charmed by spanish foibles. One can´t help but raise a smile when, for the price of a lemonade, you are dished out a plate of tapas big enough to serve as dinner! Although weary now, I hope that, following two weeks of home comforts and long, easy chats with old friends, I will be fresh faced and enthusiastic when I return to Madrid in January.

CULTURE SHOCK

I am now into my third month here in Madrid.When I moved, I envisaged these first three months as something of a trial period, after which I could justifiably retreat back home if it had been a catastrophe. Happily, I have survived without any major disasters and as yet, have no intention of retreat.

However, although I still cock a smile at Spanish idiosyncracies and relish waking up to blue skies most mornings, I think it is fair to say the Honeymoon Period is over. It´s not that I am no longer captivated by the bubbly language, exuberant culture and unhurried etiquette, but rather my enchantment with Madrid has been slightly tarnished by occasional longings to go home.

When gloomily pining for London over a bowl of soup recently, a friend advised me to google ´culture shock´. According to Wikipedia, culture shock is something that most people experience when moving abroad: after the excitement of arriving in a new place subsides, anxiety and insecurity set in – with physical and emotional symptoms. Perhaps this is a bit dramatic to refer to relocations within Europe, but it does have some resonance for me.

My initial enthusiasm to meet charming, welcoming locals has unwittingly been replaced by a foot-dragging reluctanct to date supposedly charming, Latino strangers; the refreshingly laid-back, everything-in-your-own-time service has become infuriatingly inefficient; sipping a Fanta Limón while propped up against a bustling bar has lost its appeal and instead I´m craving a squashy chair and a pot of Earl Grey...

Whereas I previously enjoyed never quite understanding the day-to-day happenings (considering it as something of an opportunity to live in my own bubble), after a series of back-to-back confusions I am now weary of total incomprehension and fed up of never knowing what the hell is going on. The initial enthusiasm has subsided and left me feeling distinctly frayed around the edges: permanently chasing sleep and pining for a city where I can understand the barman and a friendly shoulder is never far away.

Last weekend I allowed myself a guilt-free break from all things Spanish, indulging my pangs of nostalgia in an Irish pub in the North of the city. I spent a happy afternoon drinking pints, watching rugby on a big screen and chatting to a Londoner who could have walked straight off the set of Only Fools and Horses. Two games and four pints later, I left feeling comforted and revived (probably the result of the Heineken more than anything).

By no means am I having second thoughts about moving to Madrid. On the contrary, I´m even more impatient to graduate from broken spanglish to fluent spanish: when communication isn´t such a fiasco I know I will feel more of a local and less of a tourist. As and when that happens, sporadic weekends of all-things-English and visits from friends will be sufficient to ease the waves of homesickness and to refocus my rose-tinted spectacles firmly on Madrid.

Being on the wrong side of the blackboard

Having spent an unsuccessful two months meticulously editing cover letters and labouring over lengthy job applications, when I arrived in Madrid in September and flip-flopped into a language school armed only with a crumpled CV, I didn´t hold out much hope of getting an interview. As such, I was gobsmacked when after a chaotic twenty minutes I left with a job. After talking to other teachers, I soon realised that their TEFL qualifications (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) are the result of a four week residential training camp. In comparison, my seventy hour online TEFL certificate seems flimsy to say the least. Indeed, when I started the course I never anticipated that I would actually end up teaching - part of me had hoped that my half-hearted efforts to secure a position in a language school would fall flat and I would be able to retreat to the familiarity of working in an Irish pub. Instead, I have had to confront the laughable reality that I am a teacher.

In addition to being hideously underqualified, I also feel ridiculously young to be a teacher, and I quote one of my students here: “You´re not actually a teacher are you?” To say I´m learning on the job seems to be something of an understatement. After four weeks I´m still far from comfortable with blackboard, chalk and a roomful of expectant faces. Although all of the classes are exclusively in English, I have found it hard to relax into the comfort of my mother tongue, and often find myself freestyling my way through confused explanations of English grammar. Despite studying English, when it comes to explaining the idiosyncracies and foibles of a language, my knowledge fails me. Phrasal verbs have become the bane of my life. Sometimes there just is no rhyme or reason as to why things are the way things are, yet when faced blank incomprehension, the explanation, “this is an exception to the rule”, isn´t quite substantial.

My three hours of classes with children are also something of a challenge. Although gaps in my knowledge of English are less apparent, being bubbly and enthusiastic about farmyard animals at 7pm is a difinitive struggle. After a painful few weeks inflicting worksheet upon worksheet upon reluctant ten-year-olds, I have resorted to non-stop games. I´ll take games and smiles over education and frowns any day!

Grammatical improvisation and children aside, its not all been bad. I have generally been blessed with lovely, understanding, encouraging students. One invited me to the dress rehearsal of the National Orchestra of Spain, where I spent a surreal Friday morning sitting amidst the orchestra as it played Mozart´s Requiem. Another, mortified to learn that I don´t eat jamón, whisked me off to a vegetarian restaurant for a two course lunch after class. My apprehension about intensive one-on-one private classes also proved to be misplaced. I have found myself having long chats in beautiful flats with incredibly interesting people, including most recently a journalist who travels the world producing documentaries.

I am slowly coming round to the idea that teaching could be a better option than pulling pints in an Irish pub. Despite the fact that by teaching English all day my level of Spanish is remaining stubbornly low, my standard of English is coming on in leaps and bounds, and I am slowly adjusting to being the one conducting the class. In fact, now that the tables have turned on me, I keep having nostalgic pangs for university. As an unsympathetic student I would frequently criticise stilted lesson plans or boring lecturers. Now, I know I would be much more forgiving!

Lost at sea

I have now been ´living la vida loca´here in Madrid for near on three weeks. As you would expect, it´s not been at all difficult to adjust to the long afternoons sipping sangria in a sun-soaked plaza. I´ve simply swapped the umbrella normally resident in my handbag for a pair of sunnies and bullied my bodyclock into increasingly late dinners. Now, I´m happily ordering tapas when English pubs are called last orders, can navigate the city without frequently consulting the map and have sussed out a local fruit and veg market.

However, it hasn´t been quite so easy to immerse myself into the rapid garble that is naturally spoken spanish, and more often than not, I am lost at sea amidst the surrounding Spanish chatter. It seems that briefly revising my A-level notes and watching Sex and the City dubbed into Spanish has left me ill-prepared for day-to-day conversation. My ability seems to vary hugely depending on time of day, amount of sleep and quantity of alcohol consumed. Whereas at times I´m confident with full sentences (albeit littered with incorrect conjugations) at others I find myself having to supplement my shamelessly stilted spanglish with extravagant gestures such that I may as well be playing charades.

Likewise, despite having Radio Nacional de Espana permanently buzzing in the background, my ears stubbornly refuse to digest spoken spanish. I´ve adjusted by trying to read body language - smiling in all the right places, laughing where appropriate and nodding throughout conversations. However, my already short attention span has been magnified by incomprehension and I often find myself pondering over a particular grammar construction or preparing my next sentence mid-conversation. This makes dialogue even more hazardous as it is nigh on impossible to pick up the thread of a story half way through. Only occasionally do I manage to hesitantly mumble a short sentence or question - on what I hope is a related subject.

However, although I seem to spend a lot of time in a British bubble, I´m hugely impatient to be able to seamlessly flick my brain into Spanish mode, and every successful conversation I have with a spaniard triggers a flush of pride and encouragement. I´ve recently started targeting a local café when I can attach a short conversation to every drink ordered. Obviously, success rate varies in almost direct proportion to the number of drinks consumed, but I´m slowly getting to know the spanish crowd there.

I´m going to give myself until Christmas...

Sunshine, tapas, beautiful plazas… and unnecessarily complex grammatical gobbledegook

I have recently returned from a long weekend in Madrid. In preparation for uprooting to the Spanish capital in September, I spent the few days I had there optimistically searching for flats and potential employers.

Although my search was fruitless, after flip-flopping my way through the various barrios in Madrid, map in one hand dictionary in the other, I do feel I got a basic hold on the geography of the city. Having walked in disorientated circles for the first few days, by the end of the trip I had discovered short routes to my favourite people-watching hot spots – the Plaza Mayor being the prime location.

The enormous square seems to have been purpose-built for watching the world meander past, and with buskers serenading tables at restaurants, artists showing exhibitions of their work and a curiously out-of-place, overweight Spiderman flogging photographs to Americans, there is no end of entertainment for interested onlookers. I also got a good feel for ‘la vida en españa’. I enjoyed lingering over ‘tortillas de patatas’ at lunchtime, soaking up the sunshine with a beer in the evening and dining out when English pubs would be calling last orders.

The language however was something else: my A level Spanglish was wholly inadequate. I was totally nonplussed when listening to the rapid garble that is naturally spoken Spanish and was completely incomprehensible to any native speaker, stuttering nonsensical sentences that were littered with incorrectly conjugated verbs and limited by a miserably small range of vocabulary.

As such, on returning last week I was compelled to delve into my old Spanish grammar notes with a certain urgency. The prospect of returning in September to a job hunt with only a stilted command of Spanish was a powerful incentive to go back to the books.

Sadly, my dip into Spanish grammar has revealed a general knowledge of grammar that is severely lacking. A complex jumble of possessive adjectives, prepositional pronouns and reflexive verbs, multiple past tenses, auxiliary verbs and subjunctive moods, I can barely understand it in English let alone Spanish. I can’t help but feel hopelessly out of my depth!

Not to be put off, I have decided to adopt a different style of self-teaching. Rather than bash my brain with over-complicated grammatical jargon, I have resorted to a less direct approach, relying on ‘learning by immersion in the language’. This tactic has enabled me to abandon the tortuous monotony of grammar drills in favour of watching episodes of ‘Sex and the City’ in Spanish, listening to Spanish radio and perusing Spanish magazines.

Watch this space…

There is something to be said for not being in the know

With the prospect of a job interview looming uncertainly on the horizon I was recently prompted to delve into the newspapers, resolving that it was time to abandon my current self-imposed oblivion in order to appear well-informed.

It was only a brief foray. There wasn’t much in the paper that didn’t make me sink into a moody glumness and, before long, I was desperately searching for a valid distraction to justify chucking it into the recycling. The front page read: “Fit to work test blocks 76% of benefit claims” and “Energy revolution could put bills up by a third”. S n o o o o o o z z z z z e e e…

Sadly, the pace didn’t pick up as I leafed through the subsequent pages: depressing trends from yesteryear to further compound the recession-blues, demoralising predictions about everything from the moral worth of our children to the property market, spine-chilling horror stories about grizzly assaults, ‘pioneering’ medical research that either confirms the bloody obvious or conflicts with every grain of common sense (the latest being a report that alcohol can reduce arthritis, which was ironically juxtaposed next to an article about closing pubs earlier).

Amidst this humdrum jumble of dreary news I did stumble across a couple of livelier stories. My favourite part of the paper was undoubtedly the small corner of space headlined, “Mother finds five-foot snake in the laundry”. In fact, it wasn’t just a good corner but a good page, the rest being taken up by a large, colour photograph of two swallows having a spat. Another page that stood out from the dull offerings featured an article about a woman who ended up swimming 64 miles when crossing the 21mile Channel. Now that is the sort of thing I want to read over breakfast to ease me into the day - not that authorities are planning on closing pubs early!

In addition to rooting out the upbeat reports sandwiched between the monotony, I also discovered that once you have trudged through the national news, World News is a breeze in comparison. What’s going on in China is generally much more interesting than happenings in the UK. In optimistic anticipation of this potential interview, my new tactic is to fast track my way through the papers straight to World News. At least that way I will look up-to-date globally.

I recognise that it pays to be well-informed, and that papers can't just print light-hearted, annecodotal stories to make the public smile. I can understand that unfortunately, more often than not, important issues make for boring reading. However, does the British press need to be quite so cynical and negative about the future? Do they really need to devote so much space to stats about last year? Does the public really need yet more conflicting medical advice?

However, perhaps my frustration with national news is misplaced. Maybe I am just reading the wrong paper!

The gothic fantasies of Gormenghast

Keeping faithfully to my pledge to avoid the doomladen headlines about graduate employment emblazoned across the papers this summer, I have been slowly wading through a stack of dust-coated books languishing on shelves in the attic. Despite stellar recommendations from my Dad, when I approached Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, it was with a certain amount of trepidation. With over 1200 pages of small print and narrow margins it looked to be a weighty undertaking. Initially, my hesitation seemed to have been justified: curling up in bed to the opening chapter I found my mind frequently sliding off on a tangent and I ended up having to read the first page several times.

Once critic described the trilogy as ‘a gargantuan feast’, which is an apt metaphor. Though initially daunted by the scale and detail of the books, it wasn’t long before I was swept up and adrift in the mysterious fantasies of Gormenghast, devouring chapter after chapter. Like nothing I have ever read before, the Gormenghast books conjured images beyond my imagination - a creaking kingdom hiding a wealth of secrets and housing complex, idiosyncratic characters, a vast world with an overwhelming aura of mystery, an atmosphere heavy with suspense and anticipation.

I couldn’t help but be amazed at the breadth of Peake's imagination and marvel at how he managed to translate his visions into such stark visual images. He seems to have used words as a painter would experiment with different colours and textures, and I was frequently groping for a dictionary. Curious about the man behind Gormenghast, I recently read ‘A World Away’, a biography of Mervyn Peake written by his wife, Mauve Gilmore. My admiration for Peake grew as I was temporarily immersed in the exciting, artistic bohemia of 1930s Britain, discovering him to be not only a novelist, but also a poet, painter and playwright. However, his wife regretfully describes him as "A shadow. A man with a shadow”. Tragically, he was diagnosed with premature senility at only 46.

Pondering Peake’s sad fate, I began to question whether great artists are prone to suffer or have suffered from some sort of mental turmoil and ostracism from society. Certainly lots of the big names seem to be marked out from the crowd, whether it is by some tragedy in their past, a distinguishing characteristic or an illness. To mention some of those I have studied: the novelist Hermann Hesse was deeply immersed in mental physchoanalysis, journalist Joseph Roth was a Jew living in Germany and author Christopher Isherwood was a homosexual foreigner in 1920s Berlin. Does their artistic insight and sensitivity result in their being slightly removed from the mainstream? Or does their being removed from the mainstream stimulate their art?

I mulled this over for a good few days before realising that I was in fact debating the topic that I wrote my dissertation on. 15,000 words analysing whether the artist is an outsider. Should I be disheartened that I so easily forgot the result of 9 months hard toil? Or should I be reassured that my fascination with the artist still holds strong despite those 9 months?

Either way, I clearly need to reread the conclusion!

A bruising bump back to reality

When I was lounging on the sun-kissed shores of South East Asia, lost in a carefree, take-every-day-as-it-comes bubble, the thought of returning home and actively seeking out the humdrum routine of a 9 to 5 office job filled me with mortal dread.

As it turns out, I couldn't have picked a better time to return if I'd tried. I stumbled groggily off the plane into a bustling house full of family, flutes of champagne and a tableful of Mediterranean delicacies, and after a night cocooned in a fluffy cotton duvet, I awoke to a blissful mugful of steaming, strong Yorkshire tea. Over the next few days I soaked up an England basking in the glorious sunshine of a long overdue heat wave: pristine blue skies, long, balmy evenings and summery breezes that carry aromas of freshly mown grass and sausages sizzling on a BBQ - a far cry from the smoggy humidity of last weekend in Bangkok.

However, although the World Cup revelry and festival fervour of this British summertime has undoubtedly cushioned my return home, it has been a bruising bump back to reality. The happy-go-lucky mindset I accrued when travelling has already been swept away by the pressing uncertainty of what on earth to do next. I have attempted to prolong my relaxed-and-in-limbo psyche: reading novels rather than newspapers, wearing flip flops instead of high heels and avoiding makeup and smart clothes. However, my efforts, though admittedly meagre, have been fruitless. Despite pledging to carefully research working abroad before embarking on the inevitably demoralising job hunt, I have unwittingly become immersed in a frantic job hunt. Within a few days of my return I was wading through endless job listings, panicking over rapidly looming application deadlines and attending gloomy careers fairs that lamented on budget cuts.

This week I have resolved to take a step back. Armed with sunglasses, a bikini and an unread copy of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast I'm planning to revive the tranquil, serene approach to the future that I found in South East Asia. Recruitment websites, job specs and application forms will be carefully stowed in a draw for at least two days in the hope that, whether I end up working 9 to 5 in the city or on a flight out of Europe, it will have been a carefully thought out decision!

A peaceful paradise by day, a non-stop party-goers haven by night

Cystal clear, turquoise waters twinkling and glistening in the sun as they lap softly against the shores; crumbly, white sands curved in a gentle semi-circle; beaches enclosed by dramatic, craggy cliffs spurting tufts of jungle and fronted by gently swaying palm trees... There's a reason why travellers are always reluctant to leave the islands of South Thailand.

As the sun sets on this peaceful paradise the beachside serenity of the day is transformed. Sleepy shores become the crazed centre of drunken debauchery and all-night dancing. Nonchalent locals wow with daring fire display that mesmerise onlookers with hypnotic spins and swirls and the shores are cluttering with stalls selling lethal cocktail concoctions by the bucket.

It wasn't exactly authentic Thailand, Westerners substantially outnumbering Thai people, but after 9 weeks of exhaustive sight-seeing we were more than ready for such beachside hedonism. Although we crossed paths briefly with loud gaggles of those on a post-uni booze-up, when the islands felt more like Magaluf or Marbella than East Asia, dancing until the sun rises is something I can't wait to do again. I am already planning my next trip!

The contrasts of Cambodia...

I was slightly apprehensive about traveling through Cambodia, expecting a bruised country still reeling from its terrible history. Indeed, walking through the bare corridors of S21 - a school that became a torture prison - and visiting the Killing Fields - where the grassy meadow hides exhumed mass graves and features a tower of human skulls - a chill ran down my spine despite the scorching temperatures.

However, when exploring the cosmopolitan Phnom Penh, soaking up the beachside hedonism of Sihanoukville or sipping a drink on the bubbling streets of Siem Reap, such horrors seemed far away. In fact, the towering temple ruins surrounding Ankor Wat, now slowly being digested by the Cambodian jungle, herald another history entirely: a forgotten age of splendour and magnificence.

As much as I enjoyed bouncing through the tourist hotspots, I do feel that I only glimpsed slices of the real Cambodia: a solitary man with a chequered cloth wrapped about his waist laboriously ploughing the stiff, dry fields behind two cows; clustered lines of tin shacks and thatched huts; lethally persuasive child vendors; family homes used as factories to produce rice, mushrooms or noodles.

A nation full of friendly smiles, I'm only sorry not to have seen more of authentic Cambodia.