2 October 2011
In four days I have found an apartment in Valdemoro, Spain. It is in the heart of the city and next to a park. I live with one other person, a Romanian girl who has been in Spain now for 5 years. She works in a Turkish kebap restaurant and is obsessively clean. This area is very green and it is evidently important to the locals that it be so, seeing how much of the natural growth is preserved in numerous parks throughout the district. On my afternoon stroll, the big park in town was full of people enjoying fine fall weather.
Valdemoro is a sweet but not so little town of 70,000 inhabitants to the south of Madrid 20 minutes in train. It has been a somewhat difficult to meet people, more than it was in Huercal-Overa, the curious reason being that there are more people here. Fortunately, I see that there are a lot of people around my age, many who are university students, and lots of athletic clubs so I don’t think it will be so hard to find like-minded people.
I begin school tomorrow! Unfortunately, my school I.E.S. Maestro Matias Bravo has experienced the painful effect of the economic crisis and has lost 12 teachers, 2 from the English department. I don’t have a fixed schedule yet because neither do any of the English teachers, so this week is just to meet the students.
Goals for the scholastic year 2011/12
Linguistic
1) Let my ½ my music-listening, all of my novel reading, and all of my TV and movie watching be in Spanish
2) Learn a Joaquin Sabina song with words on the guitar.
Social
3) Join groups and classes that are interesting to me (swimming, triathlon, hiking, cooking, dancing, etc. are just some ideas). I hope to meet like-minded people that way.
4) Organize dinners/outings with the teachers
5) Make at least one good friend in Valdemoro
6) Hostess often (I’ve discovered this is something that’s very important to me)
7) Avoid long hours on social networks
Academic
8) Expand my knowledge of Spanish history
Spiritual
9) Pray for my students
10) Become involved and invested in a local church
11) Study teaching as a concept in the Bible
Athletic
12) Find a race in Spain, train for, and do it
13) Find good training buddies and train with them weekly
Financial
14) Save 15% of my earnings
15) Follow my budget
16) Spend boldly on important things
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