Clicking with the Spanish
I’ve been in Spain for just about a week now, and it’s quite an adjustment.
Moving from France to Spain is a larger leap than England to France. Equally, I am trying to make the transition from the workplace to the classroom.
My first impressions have been formed, and they tell you more about me than they do the locals.
Principally, I feel much more foreign here than I ever did in France. In Nice, my nationality was more like a funny hat that I would bring out and wear from time to time. Here, it’s a lot more permanent simply because of genetics; I don’t (as far as I know) look even the remotest bit Spanish, the locals react as such.
Even thus, my identity is still a bit confused. In Nice, I was so connected through my job to the town and the region PACA that I feel much more at home speaking with the French students than I do the English.
Then when you add my personality into the mix it becomes even more complex. Friend and colleague Jack Penrose, well known for his linguistic elegance and amateur poetry (rumoured) described me as “someone who flushes before he’s finished pissing.” I would translate that phrase as “time-efficient”. My life is divided into hour-long blocks of time; I enjoy darting from one meeting to another, getting from A to B. I love my Blackberry, I hate downtime.
This “time-efficiency” trait is a direct contradiction with the Spanish way of life.
Everything is closed, all the time, and nobody cares about anything. If it is agreed to meet at 1200, may god help the person who turns up at 1210, particularly if they find we’ve already left.
At the risk of being compared to Hugh Abbot, I find it’s much more difficult to click with Spanish people as we don’t seem to have very much in common. Hopefully that will change once classes start and I get involved with the PSOE (that the Spanish Labour / Socialist party… you know… the one with Zapatero in it.)
Of course it’s early to start making wild generalisations, but there really is a key difference in the mood of this part of my placement. In France, I was integrated and absorbed in the culture, ethic and identity. In Spain, I feel like I am looking at society through a lens.






