Goodbye, English teaching

And just like that, it's over.

Today was my last day as an English teacher. The kids group-hugged me to death and drew me lots of pictures with hearts and I mostly wandered around with a plastered-on smile, ambivalent and a little stunned. No matter how much you know it's coming, ending an era of life is always a bit of a shock. In just a few weeks (three to be exact) I'll board a flight and go back to America, and a few more weeks after that I'll move to Boston to begin law school. Then, on some cold, rainy, blue-toned day in Massachusetts I'll lay down across my bed and lift my face up toward the dark sky and I'll dream of sunshiny Spain. 

Teaching English hasn't been a picnic by any stretch, but I've liked it for the most part. I've worked in three elementary schools over the past two years, and each one had their merits and drawbacks. The kids are cute, but they are also loud and whiny and inattentive, and did I mention loud? Very, very loud. Some days my job was fun because I got to engage with students on interesting topics and watch them actively learning. Most days it was frustrating and a bit boring, because I am not always in charge of the classroom and I'm subject to another teacher's whims and teaching/discipline style. Cultural differences are more alive and well in the classroom than you can imagine, and sometimes I still find myself absolutely baffled by the Spanish system and why things are done a certain way. No doubt, if they came to America they'd think the same thing.

But my teaching days are over and now I can live my life without the constant need to pick apart my language and examine it like a dissected frog. Now I'm free to admit that I have no idea why we say in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening and at night. I don't know why read (present) and read (past) are spelled the same way but pronounced and understood differently. I can't explain why the expression "catch up" has nothing to do with either catching or up. I love words, and language, and now I'm free to dive back into the art of it and let go of the science and tedious mechanics.

 I'll miss the coworkers and some of the kids, the nice ones who are smart and funny and work hard. I won't miss all the behavior issues and the millions of requests to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water. I won't miss sassy nine-year-olds or kids that just refuse to work but then complain to their parents that it's too hard. 

Overall, I'm so glad I've had this opportunity. I am 100% sure that I am not cut out for a permanent position in elementary education, but hey, that's what law school is for.

Eurovision

We need to talk Eurovision. If you have not sat through a Eurovision contest with a group of Europeans, you have only lived a half-life, my friend. And by that I mean that you have avoided something that would have inevitably dragged down the quality of your life, so good for you.

Eurovision is a music contest, in which every European country (and, inexplicably, many definitely non-European countries. Israel? Azerbaijan? Sorry y'all, the credited response is ASIA) sends a musician/treacly ballad singer to compete with the other countries. Votes are cast through phone lines in a 15-minute period at the end of the show, and you aren't allowed to vote for your own country. It's like American Idol with a passport and truckloads of trashy Europop. And no Simon Cowell (by the way, I hear American Idol is still on TV even though Simon Cowell left. How can this be, America? This does not compute. He was the one and only star of that show.)

Eurovision has been going on every year for fifty-ish years, and it's a Very Big Deal. It draws 120 million viewers, which is 10 million more than the Super Bowl record. Seriously. Every year, Europeans gather together in their homes to watch this strange spectacle made of equal parts trashiness, campiness, and mediocrity.

If you ever watch Eurovision though (despite my warnings) you should be prepared for the side sport: the Super Bowl's time-honored sister activity is eating buffalo wings, and Eurovision's is complaining about the fairness of the votes. Everyone votes for their neighbors, or so the saying goes. English speakers vote for English speakers, Ukrainians vote for fellow Eastern Europeans, the Portuguese vote for the Spanish and the Spanish for the Portuguese. Complaints abound. Everyone thinks that everyone else is voting against their act because of political reasons, but everybody's song looked equally awful to me. As an outsider with no skin in the game, I claim neutrality - everyone was equally embarrassing. Voting for political reasons or because you simply like the inhabitants of a certain country over another feels like a perfectly reasonable option to me when there is nothing else to distinguish by.

Anyway, if you have watched Eurovision and you think it's amazing, feel free to tell me in the comments. I thought it was amazing...ly funny. In a ridiculous sort of way.

Not that I didn't enjoy myself, that is.

Scenes from the pueblo

Al pueblo

I'm headed to the pueblo for the weekend to visit my friend Pilar. Last time I was there we picked oranges and this time she's promised me a Spanish cooking tutorial. I think gazpacho may be on the menu (I'll report back).

See you next week? 

A few more Ronda photos

It's a nutso time to be in Spain

Another big strike today in the province of Andalucía. This time it was in the education sector (teachers, all university and high school students over the age of 16, and most students under the age of 16 too) protesting deep budget cuts in education and teacher's pay. So for the second time this spring, I had a day off because of a strike. I slept in late, went to my private classes in the afternoon, and then grabbed The Mister and headed over to watch the protests raging in the streets.

I'm not sure what the number was, but it was several thousand, by far the biggest protest we've seen in Málaga this year. The central arteries through town were cut off to traffic when protestors flooded the streets, although it was peaceful (they are mostly schoolteachers, after all).When everyone began marching, the mass of people was at least two miles long.

  

We kept running into people we knew: Málaga is a small place already, and since we've collectively worked in four city schools over the past two years, we have lots of friends at the education protests. Below are some shots of us with our coworkers (also, the official color of the protest was green, hence the matching color palettes).

Crazy times.

Lovely Ronda

Yesterday a friend took us to see Ronda, a Spanish town nestled in the foothills of central Andalucía.

Ronda was a photographer's dream. It was unseasonably cold, and rain showers blew in and out throughout the course of the afternoon, and this made the some of the most ethereal lighting conditions possible. Dark gloomy clouds, with the sun still shining in spots.

I won't waste more time telling you how fantastically gorgeous it was though; you can take a peek yourself and see what you think:

    

Hope they don't regret it

Fun fact: My blog was listed as a Recommended Expat Blog by InterNations!

You can check out my interview and profile here (the rumors are true, penises are mentioned).

For the weekend, I leave you with a little glimpse of our spring here in Málaga:

Me, by Lucia

Taken illicitly during a private English class with my favorite vivacious eight-year-old Lucía. I took a little video of her reading a paragraph in English so she could listen to it. While she was listening, she turned the tables and snapped this one of me. I found it on my phone later.

She's a rascally little punk, she is.

How to photograph your summer travel

I get a lot of questions about photography. Sometimes I even get asked for photography advice, which is fun because I still feel like a total newbie myself. When BlogHer asked me to write a post on photographing summery things, I thought perfect! Let's show the world what I don't know!

Just kidding, I do know a few things -- very few -- but I'm happy to pass them along. So get your cameras ready, because it's time to talk about photographing your summer travel/vacation/outdoor adventures.

Phoenix morning, summer 2010

First, and this is the most important of all the free advice I'll hand out today: Tell everyone you're traveling with to not be afraid of your camera. I always give people a general disclaimer that goes along these lines: I like photographs. I am a photographer. You are with me and you are my friend, therefore you will be a subject. Get used to it. If I point the camera in your direction, it's because I see something interesting, so keep doing whatever you're doing. Don't duck or hide or freeze up. It's a picture, not a public speaking event -– nervousness is not necessary. In return, I promise you that I will delete any photos that are really unflattering, and I promise not to put bad pictures of you up on Facebook or on my blog.

That usually helps loosen up your travel partners. I mean, let's be honest, everyone likes good pictures of themselves after they're already taken. You have to be willing to have a few bad snaps taken in order to get the good ones.

All right, now that you're traveling with a group of people that are miraculously not afraid of photos anymore (now that you've given them a Rudy-worthy pep talk), let's move on to the mechanics.

First, let's talk about light. When traveling in the summer, you'll get lots of great light from the sun, because you'll be taking the bulk of your pictures outside. If you learn to work with it and really think about the angle of the light, you can take some really incredible photos with great lighting. But forgetting to think about where the light is coming from is the number one culprit behind bad travel photos, indigestion and shark attacks. All right, I may have exaggerated. It's the number two culprit.

Jokes aside, light matters. If you're talking about portrait photography, you have a little more discretion over where you place your subject. Scoot over here, tilt your head a little to the right, that sort of thing. But travel photos? You can't exactly ask the Taj Mahal to take a few steps to the left. You have to work with what you're given, whether it's blazing sun or a sudden downpour, and you might only have a few minutes to take the shot. Waiting out the weather isn't always an option. So here's what to do:

If the sky is cloudy, that's great news. Nice, pretty, even light. Clouds can be great subject matter in themselves, and if it's a dreary day, I always try to include as much sky as possible in my photos.

If it's sunny out, that's great news, too. You can get the warm, cheerful, classic summer look on a bright day. Don't be afraid of backlighting, either, because with it you can make interesting, dramatic images. If you're taking a photo into the sun, makes sure that you're exposing it for the darker parts of the image. If you don't have an SLR but you rock a point-and-shoot digital camera, here's where you get comfortable with your custom camera modes. Most cameras these days have a little dial you can rotate to take pictures of the sunset, or action shots, or even feeding monkeys underwater on a Tuesday. Use them, and I think you'll be surprised at how it affects the quality of your snapshots.

Some sunny day shots, for your consideration:

 

The worst thing about traveling in the summer is that everyone else also travels in the summer. Sometimes it's annoying to be trying to take a picture of a beautiful landscape or cool local scene when you can't seem to get a shot without all the tourists swarming around. It's just how life goes sometimes. I say embrace it. Make lemonade and all that. Some of my favorite pictures have been ones where I stopped looking for the distilled shot that perfectly captures the architectural or scenic beauty, and I started looking for interesting people to include. In each one of the following pictures, I was initially kind of annoyed because there were random people "ruining" my shot. And now the thing I like most about these photos are the people. Go figure.

So, there you have it. The basics of good vacation photography: Tell your friends (or kids or husband or sister-in-law or whoever) to stop being afraid of the camera, watch the direction and quality of the available light, and embrace random people in your photos. It might not be poetry, but those are my tips for today.

Spring, thou hast been good to me

This spring has brought some of the fullest, busiest weeks of my life, overflowing with joy and friends and possibility. 

There was The Mister's birthday, and then our anniversary in which we celebrated eleven! years of life and love and teamwork. 

There were homemade paella lunches made by Spanish moms, a trip to Sevilla, field trips and beach days.

There have been houseguests galore : Jess came down from Madrid to visit us and Claire and together we had a weekend full of laughter, American food and getting caught outside in torrential downpours.

Sister of The Mister Kim came from California and we watched flamenco, sipped sangria in the sunshine and shared our lives over fried fish. 

Jerry and Carrie came all the way from Arizona, and we sat on the beach at night, looking up at the moon and sharing stories, passing around a bottle of Spanish wine to drink right out of the bottle. 

Kristin and Chet came from London, and we ate bull-tail meatballs and churros and soaked up all the Vitamin D we could get on the beach. 

I went to the US and snuggled with my mom, shared late-nights chats with a glass of wine with my dad, and laughed with my sisters until my belly ached. 

The Mister and I debated where to go to law school, weighing scholarship offers and getting increasingly stressed as the deadline drew closer and deposits were due and all we heard from our dream school was silence. And then, suddenly, there it was: an invitation to interview at Harvard, and then The Mister's interview, and then the acceptance. The indoors felt too cramped to contain the expansiveness of our delight and so we went out to the beach in the dark and ran around with all the joyful energy of children, our arms spread out to catch the breeze with the freedom and exultation of birds.

All this in roughly 45 days of life. It's been brimming with joy and happiness and sweet moments, and life feels very full right now, dripping with goodness.

P.S. You can see why my blogging schedule has been a bit spotty.

You might be a mental horny

The fad right now in my school is a book of English translations to Spanish colloquial expressions. It's been making the rounds in the teacher's lounge during recess, and my coworkers have been studying up.

The problem, and it's a big one, is that -- you know what? I'll just go ahead and show you:

The problem is that they are completely, totally wrong. After a few of them tried some of these on me (I looked at them blankly), I demanded to see the book. And you know what I found? The book is meant to be a joke. But the introduction and the title of the book, which make it clear that it's supposed to be funny and not serious, is in English.

So they can't read the disclaimer, essentially, and they think it's a dictionary. And they're walking around saying things like "shut up, polliwog!" and "he's an inksucker" with straight faces.

I told them it was a joke, but I don't think they really believed me. They keep saying these things, and I keep trying and failing to maintain some level of personal dignity because I'm laughing too hard.

Who knows? Maybe all my laughing means that I'm really just a mental horny.