Blog Entry for 10-31-10 and Happy Halloween

Blog Entry for 10-31-10 and Halloween

Happy Halloween from Spain everyone! 

            Once again the week has sped past with me keeping very busy.  This week hasn’t been exactly eventful, but a great week nonetheless.  Class stuff is all going pretty well.  In my culture class we are talking a lot about everything and it has been interesting.  We had to make our decision on whom or what we would be doing our big formal presentation over this early on this week.  I’ll be doing my presentation on Pedro Almodóvar.  He is a really famous film director, and I should be able to get a pretty good presentation together over him.  It isn’t due until the 9^th for me, but I would love to get started this week.

            In our Literature class we are currently working on a play call Don Juan Tenorio which is a very famous play around these parts.  We have been reading parts of it in class and reading other parts of it at home for homework.  It is really difficult for me to read a play in Spanish the summaries of each scene have been the only things keeping me alive.  We are actually going to go see the play this upcoming Tuesday in the evening and that should be a lot of fun.  Also I have the final copy of a big writing assignment due on Wednesday in my Literature class.  The paper isn’t very long at all, but it has to be written well and have discussed the topic well.  The topic of the paper is to write over a characteristic of Cortázar’s stories.  I’m writing mine on how in all his works he plays with the reader in the sense of what is reality and what is imaginary in the story.  We’ve already been working on it for a little while, and I just need to make some small additions to finish it. 
            As for work, it is still going very well.  I worked a ton last week, and it was pretty fun.  It was exhausting as always but good.  This week I got to work individually with some students which is something I like to do.  One of the other coaches would ask me to work on something specific such as keeping a balanced base or finishing the backhand stroke properly so I had to figure out how to say that and how to make it work.  In addition, I really think the students like one-on-one time like that.  On Wednesday, Eva, who is kind of in charge of the tennis stuff, invited me to play padel with her and some other people.  Padel is a game here that is kind of a combination between big ping pong, small tennis, racquetball, and all in an enclosed court.  It’s popular here.  Where I work there are 4 padel courts and only two tennis courts.  The padel courts are almost always full and there are padel classes that seem to be very popular.  Anyway, so on Thursday I played padel with Eva, Luz Maria who also works with us, and José who I guess is just a friend of theirs.  It was a lot of fun and being able to play tennis defiantly helps.  Also on Thursday, Israel who is actually in charge of the whole padel and tennis program there asked me if I could take the classes from 5-8 because someone was sick.  I said yes so I had a long day at the my work that day starting from 3 playing padel and then until 8 working and all that after classes.  My most difficult class was a class of just 5 kids that were all about 7 years old.  It was quite difficult to understand what they were saying to me when they said something.  Also, they sometimes had problems understanding me I think, and they were FULL of energy.  It was a fun class but hard J 

            This weekend we have 4 days without school.  We didn’t have class on Friday and Monday is All Saints Day so we don’t have class then either.  It has been rainy kind of the last two days which isn’t that fun, but I have been hanging with my friend Elliott.  We haven’t been doing much but still enjoying our time.  Yesterday I went to a Halloween party with a bunch of other people from my school.  It was at one of our tutor’s houses.  The party was a lot of fun.  I didn’t really want to spend money on a costume so I wore my “Above average Joe” shirt and said I was the “above average joe.”  It was only funny to the people from the USA.  There were people there from all over the place: Germany, Holland, Irland, USA, and Spain.  There may have been people from other countries too that I just didn’t talk to.  And that has been my week so until next time.