"Children are just like, miniature people!"

Hey guys,

I was going write about this aaaaages ago, but for some reason I never got round to it (read: I am extremely lazy and procrastinate from EVERYTHING).

Basically, it’s about my experience of being a babysitter here in Toledo. If you’re reading this and you know me well, you’d know that I was an au pair in Barcelona for two months during the summer of 2009. I’m not going to write about that right now because that would be, well, not even another blog post; there are far too many stories from that time....

Anyway, as I’d had that experience, I thought it would be good to do something similar here in Toledo, even if it was just a boost of cash (which God knows we all need!)

Sadly, I only did it for a month. I started early January, and it finished early February. Nothing to do with me (I hope), just that they only really needed me to fill in the gap between Mummy leaving for work and Daddy getting back from work. As a lot of people have experienced during this hard time, the Mummy no longer was working and therefore there was no need for me.

However, my time there did add to my Spanish experience, and my experience working with children. I was with them for a couple of hours twice a week, and attempted to teach them some English.

This is my observation for Spanish parents (I can’t say parents in general because I only have experience with Spanish parents trying to get their children to speak English)- they expect a LOT from their children. Most parents want their children to reach their potential, obviously, mine did too. However, when it comes to languages, it takes a very specific attitude to actually want to learn it. Unless you have been raised in a multti-lingual household and it’s second nature to the point where you don’t really realise that you’re speaking different languages, it’s going to be hard for you to learn another language.

Coming from the UK, where there is such a poor attitude to learning other languages (although, not quite as bad as the Spanish attitude, as I have come to realise), you have to really push to get yourself into the position where you can speak properly. I’ve loved Spanish since I started it in my first year of senior school, but I barely learnt anything until year 10, where I had taken the iniative and started listening to what my mum calls “eurotrash”- basically foreign music, a lot of which was Spanish. Then I started college and I actually started to learn how to conjugate verbs, and within the next two years I’d progressed to watching Spanish telenovelas and actually understanding them (well, most of the time). Although my mum doesn’t always approve of my music taste, I can definitely say that it helped me to learn Spanish and to speak with a proper Spanish accent.

Anyway, back to the Spanish parents. These children were being raised in a purely Spanish household, and the only English they were hearing was that taught in the school, or from learning Cd’s. When they brought in someone like me who speaks English fluently and with a (British) English accent, the children couldn’t really understand. They didn’t want to try to repeat the words to gain the proper pronunciation.

Perhaps it is simply that I am a poor teacher (which could well be, I’ve had no training for it). But I know how hard it was for me to learn Spanish and I WANTED to learn it. Most of these children just want to play; they don’t want to come home from school and have to do yet more classes.

I love children (in theory), although seeing as children are quite simply miniature adults, there are going to be some that are going to be difficult to handle. It’s also very hard to handle children that are in no way related to you- I am very good with my two brothers, and helped with the youngest a lot as he was growing up, but when it’s blood I think it’s a lot easier be involved. If I did something wrong my mum would tell me off and that would be it. I wouldn’t be fired or, worse, arrested or sued. In Barcelona it took a lot of my patience to not snap at the children, I’m not quite sure how I survived that....xD

Anyway, the two that I babysat for here were characters. A 9 year old boy and a 7 year old girl, they behaved well (most of the time). When they weren’t trying to wrestle each other, the girl wasn't shoving things down her trousers and the boy wasn't avoiding doing his homework (which was every single time). They both loved Spongebob, which was a great topic of conversation and was one way I incorporated English into the conversation without them really realising it- draw pictures of the characters and then write down the English names, and explain what the different parts of Spongebob’s world were called in English. To be honest, I’m not quite sure who enjoyed that part more, me or them. They had some of the best Spongebob things- even a Spongebob cheese-toastie maker.

I’m 20 years old and I’m impressed by those things.....I’m a bit worried.

Anyway, even though it came to a pretty abrupt end, I’m glad I had the experience. It’s experiences like those that make me realise what I really do (or don’t) want to do when I’m older. I’m not sure nannying is quite my thing. Going to Barcelona was without doubt one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, but in turn it was one of the most rewarding- it was the longest I’d ever been out of England for at that time, the longest I’d gone without seeing my family, and the first time I’d ever lived abroad. All at 19. Working with these two children here in Toledo just cemented the fact to me that I couldn’t do that as a full-time job. I’m not totally rejecting the idea of teaching a class of young children, because I think there are a lot less pressures on you (that might sound paradoxical, as there are many more children and many more parents, but at the end of the day the parents have a lot less control over what you do, or what they want you to).

I’m sure this seems very unorganised, and that would be because it is.....

xD

A show of bravery or the ultimate cowardice?- The Spanish Bullfight

I haven’t posted for a while. I am sorry.

This blog post could be quite.....controversial. I know there are a lot of people out there who are very against bullfighting, and I understand all the reasons why. It is not a humane sport, by any means.

However, whenever we had to do the obligatory debate about bullfighting in whatever Spanish class I was in at the time, I could see both sides of the argument.

Bullfighting has been, and still is in some parts of the country, a big part of Spanish culture. Whether for the fights themselves, or purely for the stadiums, the pictures of bulls everywhere, the cry of “ole!”

I went to my first (and most probably my last) bullfight ever on Saturday. When my flatmate told me that there was a bullfight coming to Toledo, to be honest it didn’t cross my mind that I wouldn’t go. When else am I going to be able to experience something so Spanish, apart from whilst I am here? Love it or loathe it, it embodies for many people Spanish culture (along, of course, with flamenco dancing, siestas and tapas). Good or bad, this was going to an experience.

I write my next sentence tentatively. I can’t say that I enjoyed it per se, but I must admit that I felt a huge sense of excitement, adrenaline, being swept up with the crowd watching these magnificent beasts charge around the bullring until their untimely death. And they were magnificent beasts. You could see their muscles moving underneath their shiny coats as they ran.

Some were more angry than others, some more strong. Generally it went from the first bull being the weakest until the last (in this case the sixth bull) which was the strongest, the most angry, the most likely to give a good show. And that last bull.....well, that last “fight” blew me away.

I don’t think you can really call it bull “fighting”. True, bulls and man were not born equal; bulls are an awful lot stronger than a man and have a much higher capacity of being able to kill (without having to use weapons such as knives or guns). However, this aside, when the bulls get into the ring, of course they are pretty quickly stabbed in the back with a lance by a man (a picador) on a horse. Later on he is stabbed again. These lances are left inside the bull, so that gradually, the bull loses it’s strength.

So then, a fair fight? Absolutely not. Of course, they have to weaken the bulls to be able to perform the “dances” with the bulls, but this is supposedly a show of man’s power over the bull. Except, of course, the bull has been weakened so much that it doesn’t really have a chance. And that’s where the element of cowardice comes in.

Not to say that I would be able to stand in a bullring with a bull and not run away screaming. I’m not sure I could ever look a bull in the eyes knowing that he could disembowel me with one flick of his head. But then, of course, that is one of the many reasons why I would never be a torero.

The last fight, as I mentioned before, was the one that stuck with me. I knew the torero was crazy when he knelt in front of the gate from which the bulls entered. On his knees, he had the pink flag in his hands. As the bull entered, the torero used both arms to pull the cape around his body, making the toro follow it. Later on, after a scuffle, the torero ended up on the floor. After getting up and recovering, he knelt in front of the bull, and blew it a kiss. All for show of course, but I have to admit that in that moment, I understood why people would want to attend bullfights.

It’s something that I am never, ever going to forget. I wish that the bulls didn’t have to die, that there was some way they could do this whole thing without killing....but of course, that is the whole point of these things. It’s like the Romans who used to attend gladiator fights; partly for the show of skill, and partly the excitement of knowing that someone at least was going to die that day, in front of their eyes.

I am in no way glorifying what I saw that day. I am glad I went, if it only means that I can better form my opinion about it. That I’m happy that six bulls had to die that for me to do so? Absolutely not. But before this I had never understood why bloodlust was so entrenched in human nature; now I have a much better understanding.

(I'm sorry for the poor writing, I only slept for one hour last night :()