This Week's Best Moment in Teaching

As all of you know, every Wednesday I teach two 15-year-old girls. I’ve lately gotten them to speak more and caused more than the occasional eruption of teenage girl laughter. Their comprehension, especially while listening to native speakers, has markedly improved, and their Spanish accents have eased ever so slightly.
Yesterday, we were working with the second conditional. An example of this, for those of you who don’t spend most of the week either planning or teaching ESL lessons, would be: If I were you, I wouldn’t touch that burning hot stove.
Student A, Cristina, had to ask Student B, Laura, the question, “If you could be a member of the opposite sex for one day, what would you do?”
Laura looked confused, and as I opened my mouth to try to help her along, she looked at me and asked, “But, what can a boy do that we cannot do?”
She wasn’t stumped by the grammar. She had no issue understanding the question. The mental block resulted from her utter inability to think of something that a boy could do that she couldn’t.
After recovering from the week’s best moment in feminism, I of course replied, “Nothing. Well, they can pee standing up.”

Carnaval

I believe in the communal need to put on costumes and get wasted. (Apparently, so does Nietzche. Something about Dionysian revelry leading to a sense of belonging to a higher community thus causing us to momentarily transcend universal suffering. Whatever. I believe in alcohol).

A few weeks ago, after much deliberation and complication, I went to Cadiz for Carnaval. The University of Malaga sent 29 buses full of students and other costume-clad enthusiasts to Cadiz for one night. We left at 4pm and returned at 8am. After my friend saved me from my original plan to go alone to a city packed with drunken fairies, nuns and devils, I ended up going with a group of Spaniards. The girls dressed as Eskimos and the boys as monks. (I dressed as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Ask me how many times I had to explain that one). As monks were once the keepers of alcohol, these young men carried their own barrels, filled with mojitos.

From what I remember, which is far more than I expected to, the whole night was a rush of conversations with strangers in black face or dressed as clowns. After seeing my second group of Spaniards dressed as black people (honestly, “What are you?” “I’m black.” “Seriously? Just black? You’re not even, like, Beyoncé or something?” “Um, no. My costume is that I’m black.” “Oh, yeah. Sure. Ok.” Except in Spanish), I gave up on trying to explain the historical significance of the offense and had another mojito. All in all, the night was joyous, and although everything in my basket was stolen including Toto, I felt very close to my fellow man, if only because I saw him pissing on every street corner and tree in Cadiz.

I’ve also included, for your viewing pleasure, a video from a drag show I somehow stumbled upon the night before. Every year, in Plaza de la Constitución, at the top of Calle Larios, there is a parade followed by a drag show. Needless to say, between the lip-syncing to “We Are Family” and the sparkles, I couldn’t have been happier.