If pre-drinking on your own counts as a social activity, then my social life is riveting. I did get Alexa over Christmas though, so now if I ever miss the home environment I can just ask her to launch insults at me.
My life pretty much consists of weekends now. Monday-Thursday is about five hours of teaching each day, of varying degrees of difficulty. Try and get a group of 15-year-olds to pronounce ‘hypotenuse’, let alone understand what it actually means, and you might begin to understand the variation I’m on about. Then I’ll be doing a presentation on British weather to 11-year-olds and make jokes about how it is always grey and rainy in England, only for them not to know what grey or rainy means, or even where England is.
That being said, weekends make up for it without a doubt of a shadow. I’ve only spent one weekend of the last four in Mérida. It’s not that there’s nothing to do, it’s just that I don’t think washing and tidying are plans for a weekend when you’re 21. An induction hob can only get so shiny. Anyway, I’ve spent a weekend in each of Seville, Barcelona and Ciudad Rodrigo. That’s not the order of how good they were, it’s the order starting with which one I went to first.
Seville was easy. Two hours on the bus, on Spanish roads as quiet as my one-man flat, and I’d arrived. It’s a really nice place, and has a proper city feeling. I don’t know if I’m just saying this because I now have a bit of a warped sense of city-life, given that I live in one, supposedly, and yet it is invariably called a pueblo by most who live here. Airbnb is truly a great modern invention, and at this time of year – off-season, I believe it’s called – we managed to land quite a tidy one for not very much money. I went to a gay club for the first time, which was great. In my, albeit limited, experience, gay people have always been really friendly, as have Spanish people. Thus, gay Spanish people were probably the nicest people I’ve ever met. Seville also has possibly the only fully vegetarian tourist attraction I’ve come across, named the setas, and more commonly known as the mushroom. For this reason, I enjoyed it. Apart from that, I also found out, reluctantly at first, that gin and tonics are a great drink, both refreshingly enjoyable and more than excellent value in Spain. Don’t say I’m out here not appreciating the finer Spanish lifestyle.
Barcelona wasn’t easy. After a combination of four modes of transport over nine hours; I arrived. A bus at one in the morning to Madrid and a flight from Madrid at nine was not my ideal night in/out, but it does come in ahead of pre-drinking alone. After the discovery in Seville that Cava was both extortionately cheap and a great celebratory drink (admittedly this fact was not discovered by us, last weekend), it was one of only a few things we picked up at the supermarket. I also came across turmeric, which I’ve been looking for ever since arriving in Mérida but reluctantly thought that I’d have become a bit/lot (delete as applicable) of a sad man if my highlight of the weekend was seeing that lovely yellow spice. Barcelona also had a proper city-feel (you see what I’m getting at, I’m sure) and I’m glad I’ll be able to compare some before/after photos of the Sagrada Família, if they ever finish it. There’s something incredibly frustrating about people not appreciating foreign culture. How we ended up in an Italian restaurant is a reason known only to Will Curtis, or why eating after 10pm is an issue (again, Curtis) but I’m glad that it was only a weekend, and not a week away, because we would’ve probably come to blows.
Moving briefly onto Ciudad Rodrigo, I spent it with some family friends, who comfortably out-aged me at least 2:1 and comfortably out-drank me 100:1. It’s another pueblo, so I felt right at home almost immediately. On some levels it was educational, I’m just not sure which levels. I know I speak a lot about toilets, but there was a true pinch yourself moment that the country you’re living in can’t honestly be as backwards as it is (see below). My small talk isn’t great, it gets worse in Spanish. Usually it starts and ends with ‘how long have you been living here for?’. After that, I just nod and say ‘ahh, sí’ a lot, feeling much like I’ve just asked a student if the example sentence is affirmative, negative or a question and they say ‘yes, yes’. There’s nothing like making small talk on a tour of 20-foot high city walls at four in the morning. One of us might have felt like throwing themselves over them – and I’m sure my small talk could take most of the blame.
Hasta luego,
Bill x
A Conta/La Cuenta/Bill Abroad 