Mountains, beaches and the advaced level class

Friday made one week I’ve been in the city of Málaga. (This may seem odd given the last entry, but it was supposed to be backdated. It took me a while to get it up. Tee hee. No pun intended.) The look of the city is somewhat difficult to explain, and more difficult still as I’ve only been here a week. Málaga is the first large city in Spain coming up from North Africa. It sees a fair amount of tourism and immigration but nothing so intrusive that one notices off the bat. It’s quite obviously a very large port. There’s a nice center to the city, a web of nicely paved pedestrian streets with bars, shopping and restaurants. There are very few chains outside of the main train station. (Except there is a Dunkin’ Donuts, and I find it odd that something I never craved before is so tempting because it’s out of place). As for this, I’m pretty sure bars are open all the time, restaurants on the other hand have very specific hours. For lunch, you’ll be hard pressed to find anything that really opens before 1:30 or stays open past 4. For dinner, nearly nothing starts serving until at least 7:30 or 8. This seems to be true throughout Spain; everything except for restaurants closes between 2 and 4.
Málaga is going through a period of some needed restoration. In 2016, it is to be the site of some European culture capital something or other, and as a result there are lots of signs and scaffolding that bear explanations to this effect. There will be blocks of beautiful buildings that almost look connected to each other with balconies with iron trace work bars, and then it will abruptly stop. There’ll be an empty lot, and the side of the building next to it looks as though someone tore the last building off, leaving only a rusted orange outline of a roof. But, for the most part, the city is beautiful in its dirty Spanish way. On one side it’s surrounded by mountains and on the other, the ocean. The weather is a lot like Los Angeles, and, to top it off, there’s an inexplicably amount of palm trees and a dried up river that runs through it.
Finding an apartment was not the world’s easiest task, but the process did alert me to something wonderful: my Spanish is far better than I thought. I found an apartment on Calle Ollerías. It’s fifteen minutes from the beach, ten from my school, and five from all the bars. I’ll be living with three Spaniards. This sentence is unfortunately in the future tense because I’m currently residing on the very long Ikea couch of some other friends on the program. I’m still living out of my suitcase, which is something I’m accustomed to but was hoping wouldn’t continue much longer. Thankfully, I’ll be able to move in on the 13th of this month.
I work at the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas. They are all over the country, and there purpose is to provide a cheap way for any European citizen to learn another language. It’s mostly adults, a few teenagers and some retirees. The EOI in Málaga is probably the largest in Andalusía, so they offer a lot of languages: English, Spanish (for foreigners), French, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, and German. They’ve kindly allowed me to take German classes at the school for free, the only rub being I have the world’s most erratic teaching schedule, so it was difficult to find a beginning course at a time where I could attend most of the classes. My teaching schedule is nuts because they’re trying to get my adorable little American accent to make an appearance in all 30 something of their advanced classes.
Teaching can be exhausting. You wouldn’t have thought speaking your own language could tire one out so, but speaking as slowly as I’m supposed to (I still speak to quickly) makes my whole mouth ache. My very first day I showed up to get my schedule, etc, and five minutes later I was in a classroom being told to speak. “It’ll be fine. Just let them ask you questions.”
Never again will I enter a classroom without a lesson plan. I somehow ended up writing the words binge drinking on the board and attempting to explain the problems of alcohol and obesity in the United States. My second day, I took the theme of American stereotypes and ran with it. Here are some facts you didn’t know about us:
We all eat hamburgers and are overweight, except for the people in California where everything is organic or silicon. (I did an exercise where I had them draw the “typical American” on the board at the end. Pepe drew a pair of breasts so large that there was no room for a head.)
We’re all in a hurry.
All black people drive huge cars with huge rims.
Every American owns a gun and a Stetson. (Yes, one of my students actually asked me about Stetsons.)
We all have curly hair, and we’re all ‘estressed.’ (They have a bit of trouble with words that start with s. These words all mysteriously acquire an e sound at the beginning.)
In all honesty, things are going well, and I’m starting to enjoy teaching. My teachers usually leave me alone to teach, and often leave the room entirely as there shouldn’t be any disciplinary issues to deal with. My biggest problem is that I speak too quickly. But, I’ve reminded all my students repeatedly and with very large gestures to tell me to “slow down crazy American girl.” One of the teachers told me they seem to like me very much because all my classes have left the room smiling. My main job is to get them talking and make them feel comfortable doing it. This for me has never been such a difficult task.