It certainly does feel like home. Same apartment, same neighborhood, same furniture, most of the same restaurants and stores.
(Our apartment is roughly in the middle of this picture.)
Even the same school for Annabel! Well, it turns out that this part of life is in fact very different this time. Entering a new school at 11 is a lot more traumatic than doing so at 4. Back then she was hardly aware of not speaking the language, and picked it up quickly with no conscious effort. This time she knows how much she doesn't know, and hates not being able to understand what's being said around her.
And the classes are a challenge, for a variety of reasons. English and Math are sometimes extremely boring, Spanish and French and Social Studies (all taught in Spanish) are so difficult that she's been assigned tutors to work on her own beginning Spanish and French. Only P.E., Music, and Art are just right. But the worst "class" of all is lunch. She has to eat the hot lunch from the cafeteria, as all students do, and the teachers make her eat what they consider enough of each course (technically only half) before allowing her to move onto the next (and eventually to be dismissed to recess to talk to her friends). It's a shock to the system of a non-Spanish self-proclaimed picky eater. Although her pickiness is much reduced these days, her tastes do not extend to everything on the lunch menu.
The friend situation, luckily, is going well. She almost never sees her old friend Aitana and other old classmates, unfortunately, because they put her in a lower grade, the one where her birthdate is supposed to locate her (partly because her old class was full and had already turned down other students). Her old class is the first year of secondary but she's been placed back in the last year of primary, and the two have different schedules entirely, including the breaks, so she only sees Aitana on the bus to and from school. (Moreover, those lucky secondary students are not in thrall to the lunch police, and they get to have lockers, and...well, you get the idea.) But she's made three friends in her new class, including one native English speaker, and already has a sleepover party invitation for next week, thirty miles north of here up in Gijon.
So, on balance, the classes are trying, the friends are great, the lunch is awful. Add in the fact that she hasn't been subjected to the discipline of a long school day since last May, and you can perhaps understand that Annabel is not a happy camper.
At least she loves the uniform, even though she misses not being able to wear other clothes to school. Isn't she cute?
This is her doing homework in the "track suit" version of the uniform, for the two days a week when they have P.E. A more formal version of the uniform will no doubt appear in a future blog.
We had our first excursion out of town this weekend, to the shrine of Covadonga and the cute coastal town of Ribadesella. It was sponsored by the local international student organization, and we went with all six of our students as well as forty more students from several different groups. Alex and I were the only "older" people on the trip, and the representative of the student group who was supposedly in charge of things was more interested in talking to his girlfriend that providing any information about the places we were visiting. (To be fair, he was not an expert in those places, being himself from Peru, but he had lived in Oviedo for several years and was nominally in charge of the operation.) We were forced by ice on the road to change the itinerary and abandon the leg of the trip that would have taken us up to the beautiful lakes in the mountains above Covadonga. But as you can see, we still saw some beautiful sites, including both the mountains and the sea. (There's a taste of the thick fog we traveled through in the picture of the church at Covadonga.)
Annabel and I did a little beachcombing, since we wouldn't allow her to swim in the North Atlantic in January (what horrible parents!), and I'll leave you with a final shot of her in the purple hat she bought that day in the market in Cangas de Onis.
(Our apartment is roughly in the middle of this picture.)
Even the same school for Annabel! Well, it turns out that this part of life is in fact very different this time. Entering a new school at 11 is a lot more traumatic than doing so at 4. Back then she was hardly aware of not speaking the language, and picked it up quickly with no conscious effort. This time she knows how much she doesn't know, and hates not being able to understand what's being said around her.
And the classes are a challenge, for a variety of reasons. English and Math are sometimes extremely boring, Spanish and French and Social Studies (all taught in Spanish) are so difficult that she's been assigned tutors to work on her own beginning Spanish and French. Only P.E., Music, and Art are just right. But the worst "class" of all is lunch. She has to eat the hot lunch from the cafeteria, as all students do, and the teachers make her eat what they consider enough of each course (technically only half) before allowing her to move onto the next (and eventually to be dismissed to recess to talk to her friends). It's a shock to the system of a non-Spanish self-proclaimed picky eater. Although her pickiness is much reduced these days, her tastes do not extend to everything on the lunch menu.
The friend situation, luckily, is going well. She almost never sees her old friend Aitana and other old classmates, unfortunately, because they put her in a lower grade, the one where her birthdate is supposed to locate her (partly because her old class was full and had already turned down other students). Her old class is the first year of secondary but she's been placed back in the last year of primary, and the two have different schedules entirely, including the breaks, so she only sees Aitana on the bus to and from school. (Moreover, those lucky secondary students are not in thrall to the lunch police, and they get to have lockers, and...well, you get the idea.) But she's made three friends in her new class, including one native English speaker, and already has a sleepover party invitation for next week, thirty miles north of here up in Gijon.
So, on balance, the classes are trying, the friends are great, the lunch is awful. Add in the fact that she hasn't been subjected to the discipline of a long school day since last May, and you can perhaps understand that Annabel is not a happy camper.
At least she loves the uniform, even though she misses not being able to wear other clothes to school. Isn't she cute?
This is her doing homework in the "track suit" version of the uniform, for the two days a week when they have P.E. A more formal version of the uniform will no doubt appear in a future blog.
We had our first excursion out of town this weekend, to the shrine of Covadonga and the cute coastal town of Ribadesella. It was sponsored by the local international student organization, and we went with all six of our students as well as forty more students from several different groups. Alex and I were the only "older" people on the trip, and the representative of the student group who was supposedly in charge of things was more interested in talking to his girlfriend that providing any information about the places we were visiting. (To be fair, he was not an expert in those places, being himself from Peru, but he had lived in Oviedo for several years and was nominally in charge of the operation.) We were forced by ice on the road to change the itinerary and abandon the leg of the trip that would have taken us up to the beautiful lakes in the mountains above Covadonga. But as you can see, we still saw some beautiful sites, including both the mountains and the sea. (There's a taste of the thick fog we traveled through in the picture of the church at Covadonga.)
Annabel and I did a little beachcombing, since we wouldn't allow her to swim in the North Atlantic in January (what horrible parents!), and I'll leave you with a final shot of her in the purple hat she bought that day in the market in Cangas de Onis.
1 comment:
Annabel, you rock the track uniform!! Maui was awesome, but now Fairbanks is cold again. Miss you all. :)
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