My approach to this year is a bit different than many of my fellow teachers. In Sevilla, our conversation often drifted to travel plans, and nearly everyone intends to see as much as they can. Don’t want to waste an opportunity. How can you pass on the 20-euro fare to see Madrid, Valencia, or Barcelona? Not to mention the 40-euro Ryanair ticket to Morroco, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Greece, Poland, the UK, Scandinavia, and on, and on, and on. . .
I guess my outlook is a bit different. I came here to sink into my community, to learn about the culture by participating in it, and above all, to slow down. While this experience doesn’t lend itself to the same kind of exciting stories, it instead maintains a subtle pleasantness. Certainly I can’t claim to have conquered something as vague and non-distinct as “participating in the culture” and I honestly have a long way to go before I’ve “sunk into the community”, but I can unequivocally say I have enjoyed slowing down.
My work schedule, while a bit flexible and unpredictable, bears no resemblance to what I might be doing were I in the US. True, I’ll have teachers asking me to join their next class, sans-preparation, when I’m just about to head home, but at the end of the week, I’ve rarely been at the school more than twenty hours, and of those, only about 8-12 actually in class. And so more than anything, I’ve loved having time to read, to cook, to sleep without an alarm, to sign up for Yoga and Judo classes, and to do it all without careful planning or scheduling. (Yeah, I guess I am bragging.) Advice to manage stress by squeezing an extra “stress-relieving” activity into an already overbooked day has always struck me as a bit odd.
So I’m planning to spend most of my time here in Albox whether or not it has the historical castles, cathedrals, gardens, the nightclubs or the movies (it does not). That said, I don’t have to go and be an extremist about it. In fact, I've just returned from my first weekend trip, Granada. Stories forthcoming.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I know exactly what you mean. When I studied abroad in France, there were people who always stayed together, traveled a lot, and thus remained "foreigner."It is true that we can't be "native" that easily, but we can at least cultivate a local culture at first hand, enough that we can have a sort of "second hometown."Well, it depends on how much we immerse ourselves into a local community, I guess.
That's no small coincidence I guess. Tomo, many of my ideas about living abroad come from watching you do it.
Thanks for commenting.
Post a Comment