Part-time Job.

His name is Georges Edouard and he wears his peppery black hair slicked back behind his ears, occasionally it slips out of place.  His pin stripped pants, shined shoes and collared shirts make him look like a professional, but I have my doubts.  His english accent is not influenced with a spanish tongue, no it is definitely a product of the neighboring country of France.  Short in Stature, the top of Georges head barely surpasses the height of my chin.  Meeting someone for the first time, especially when they have the potential to be my future employer, I guess I tend to evaluate them with a sharper more critical eye.  After an hour of asking questions, negotiating and small talk, Sarah Crooks (my Canadian teammate/roommate) and I walked out of the Frenchman’s office with our first teaching jobs.  Somos maestras (we are teachers)!!! 

There seems to be a great need for native english speakers to teach here in Alcobendas, and since Sarah and I have our days free we figured, why not?  My classes don’t start for another week or so, but Sarah’s already have.  From the sound of it, I am going to need to brush up on my english!  Present perfect, auxiliary verbs, subjunctive, phrasal verbs, the list goes on.  Many of us speak english without thinking twice about why we say what we say and how we say it; these English classes will be a learning experience for both student and teacher!

As well as teaching twice a week, I will start “working” as a very part time au pair for our teams doctor.  Pablo is our team doctor and I have had the pleasure of getting to know him pretty well during the month of September.  Nothing was seriously wrong with me, but I did manage to take a nice little chunk of flesh out of my left index finger with a cooking knife.  Anyway, Pablo has 3 little kids and in the words of my high school basketball coach, they are just so “cotton pickin” cute;)  Maria is 9, Juan is 8 and Luis is 4.  Juan attends a bilingual school which has allowed him to speak as well as understand English the best out of the 3 children.  Luis is just a young tyke but he can count to 10 in English and he is quite proud of that fact;)  I will start going over to their house for 2 hours or so per week to play with the kids and to help them become better english speakers.  I am really excited about this opportunity because for me there is nothing better than spending time with a family that is from the area.  Knowing a family gives a person such as myself the luxury of seeing how they live, what they do for fun and how they spend their meals.  I didn’t start learning spanish until the 5th grade, and I am so impressed that at the ripe age of 4 Luis can already count in another language.  I am excited to see how rapidly his young, impressionable brain will pick up on my words.  

The same day that I accompanied Pablo to his house to meet his kids and wife, he took me to watch a basketball team play called, Real Madrid.  On this particular team there were several guys that I recognized, but only because I had seen them on T.V playing side by side with Pau and Marc Gasol as well as Ricky Rubio just a week before in the European Championship game. The game was fast paced and quite entertaining to watch.  

Ok, now onto our first conference game of the season.  We played a team called Huelva.  They are located in the southwestern part of Spain along the Gulf of Cadiz coast, however we did not actually get to see the Gulf.  Our game started at 6:30pm and we left Madrid’s Atocha train station (largest railway station in Madrid) at 1pm.  Does that train station sound familiar to anyone?  There was a terrorist attack there on March 11, 2004.  Sad story, I won’t elaborate on that.  It is a beautiful train station, though, complete with a botanical garden inside.  A high speed, Spanish bird that cuts through the air at clips of up to 300 km/hr or 186 mph was about to be our mode of transportation for the next 2.5 hours.  This was my first time riding on Spain's AVE (alta velocidad espanola) services.  What would have taken more than 5 hours on a bus took us a mere 2.5 hours on one of these comfortable speed demons.  We were riding preferente, which isn’t first class but isn’t tourist class either, it’s right in the middle.  There were televisions showing movies, newspapers being handed out, and people roaming around the car, oblivious to the fact that we were cruising down the track like Jeff Gordon during a Nascar race. 

The front to the AVE trains.

The scenery was not full of vineyards and mountains but was instead filled with miles upon miles of dry, hard, sandpapery looking desert.  There were several large rolling hills, but not quite mountains.  The trees that covered many square miles of this dehydrated and thirsty looking land looked to me like young stalks of broccoli.  Short, thick trunks and bushy tops.  Of course these trees weren’t oversized stalks of broccoli but were actually olive trees.  Olive trees thrive in dry conditions, but it still amazes me how something so lively and green can come from soil that looks incredibly cruel and heartless.  

Olive Groves.

For lunch we ate on the train, standing up in the trains small cafeteria space.  My coach is such a sweetheart.  He made all of us lunch!  He had made 3 different and delectable types of pasta salad, tortilla, sandwiches with some sort of tuna and tomato spread, and he had also bought fruit and beverages.  As we ate lunch I gazed out the windows and all I could see were olive trees, I felt as if we were literally floating through and amongst dark green clouds.  The train dropped us off in Sevilla and from there we boarded a bus and rode that for about an hour until we reached Huelva.  

Huelva’s gym was beautiful and full of several thousand seats the color of UNC’s tarheels.  Before we took the floor to warm up, my teammates and I huddled together in a dark locker-room watching the screen of Charly’s lap-top.  Our strength coach, Chiri, had put together a video for us that revolved around clips from Coach Carter.  The movie was motivational and comical;)  The game came and went and we found ourselves sitting high and mighty at 1-0!  After the game we usually stretch as a team, but Saturday was drastically different.  All I heard my coach yelling was something in spanish that meant “GO GET YOUR STUFF FROM THE LOCKER-ROOM AND GET ON THE BUS.  WE DON’T HAVE TIME FOR SHOWERS, NOW GO, GO, GO!!”  

Now, we played in the south of spain and so the heat was quite a bit more ferocious, which means that my jersey was absolutely saturated.  The thought of traveling for the next 4 hours in the condition that I was in was not at all appealing.  We ran to the bus, drove, drove, drove, and then ran as fast as our tired legs could carry us into and through the train station.  If we would have showed up 30 seconds to a minute later we would’ve missed our train. Oooofta.

As if this funny post-game chaos wasn’t enough, Marta, Sarah and I stood out on our balcony at 1:30am in our bath towels, matches in hand, looking at some sort of power box hoping to do something right that would miraculously turn our hot water back on.  VICTORY, after 10 minutes we were 2-0 for the day.  

“Leslie’s Loose Ends” 

-So far in Spain, I have met several Minnesotans from Minneapolis, Rochester (who knew who Katie Ohm was!), Maple Grove and yesterday tops the list.  Every Sunday morning in Madrid in a neighborhood called La Latina, there is a huge market called, El Rastro, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Rastro.  It might just be the busiest place on earth, ok perhaps that was a slight exaggeration, but it’s really busy.  Anyway I somehow found myself walking behind to young ladies who were speaking english and one of these ladies looked like a distant friend of mine from High School.  The last I heard, Alana Kalin was supposed to be living and working in Argentina, but her plans changed and she ended up in Madrid instead!  I could hardly believe our luck, to be in the same place at this huge market.  We could easily have walked right past each other without even the slightest knowledge of the other’s existence!  Now perhaps I’ll have my first American fan in the stands and a dinner date with a high school friend;)

-Trying to tell jokes in another language is hilarious

-Sarah Crooks’s family uses 3 refrigerators and 4 deep freezers.  I guess that’s what you do when you have 12 children.

Congrats to everyone who ran in the marathon on Sunday, quite the accomplishment! and let’s go Vikings!!!

love,

Leslie