Intercambio a Quintanar

Sunday 2013/12/08
This will be my last post on this page for a bit. We will be off on our Tour of Spain tomorrow at 6:40am. Hasta la Proxima.


Friday 2013/12/05

Well I didn’t get to writing much yesterday, but to be honest when I got up at a quarter past 6 and did all I needed to do for the day ahead it was already a quarter to eight and that’s time to go to school. But never fear; today is Constitution Day is Spain and we are taking a day off. Parky and I are at the beach in Valencia with plenty of time to let you know what’s going down.

On Wednesday we went to a ‘Romanero’ to watch him make ‘Romano’. They are a specific type of scale that was invented in Italy 200 years before Christ and a huge revolution in their time as they allowed things to be weighed without occupying the time necessary to establish exact measurements with a balance scale. You’ll see them in the pictures. He is a fourth generation Romanero and still uses the tools handed down by his great-grandfather. His father has passed away and he is therefore the last Romanero in the world. He has two daughters, but when he dies there will be no more. He is a master craftsman and a genuinely likeable bloke. All of the students were quite enthralled by his skill and ancient techniques.

After that we went to the local cooperative winery. It was quite good, but after the Romanero it looked decidedly 21^st century and not dissimilar to wineries in our area. It was nonetheless a good and interesting experience. We discovered that La Mancha (the province in which we live) produces 25% of the wine in all of Europe. I don’t remember the figures but it is quite a substantial amount.

After the winery we went out for a hot choco and back to school. In the evening we went to El Toboso. El Toboso is the town where Miguel de Cervantes was a tax collector in the late 1500s and early 1600s. It was where he fell in love with a woman of nobility and when they were discovered he was rushed out of town by goons hired by her brother and delivered a message by said goons that stopped him from ever returning. That part of the story actually happened. Then he went on to write what locals here believe to be the second most read book in history “The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha”. The love interest of the hero of the book is called ‘Dulcinea of El Toboso’ and is reportedly based on his real life love interest. The town is described in detail in the 408 year old book and is recognisable today from that original description (if that doesn’t blow your mind, you are not paying attention). All of this so far Actually Happened. Where it gets confusing is that the house that Cervantes’ (real life) love interest actually lived in now belongs to the town council and is kept in its original state, but it is called ‘La Casa de Dulcinea’ (Dulcinea’s house) and is a museum preserved as though Dulcinea actually lived there. But Dulcinea never lived anywhere because she is a fictional character. And the whole town is dedicated to Dulcinea, who never existed. It is a fantastically pretty town with a real and amazingly interesting history, I just think they have over-egged the pudding a bit … Wonderful experience though!

Yesterday we went to an artisan who carves religious imagery out of wood. He is obviously a world-class craftsman. There are pictures of him presenting his works to the King of Spain. He is hired by Catholic churches all over the world to recreate or restore wooden statues that are hundreds of years old and he obviously makes enough money at it to justify leaving his practice to do it full time. Yes, he’s one of the greatest wood carvers in the world and a medical doctor. Some people are just hard to like. No, I kid of course. He seemed like a really top bloke with whom I could quite easily have spent an afternoon drinking beers and trading tall-tales. He is just really, really talented!

We also went to the old (1500AD) church, which of course contained some of Phillipe’s statues and it was wonderful and pretty. Very old, but very, very cold. I’ll post some pics.

You may not hear from me for a few days now as we are the beach in Angela’s beach house in Alicante (near Valencia). It’s a tough life, but I think I am just strong enough to handle it.

 

 

Thursday 2013/12/05
Yesterday we went to a large farmers cooperative winery, a church, a scale maker and the village of El Toboso. I'm going to write about them later; but first here are the piccies.


Wednesday 2013/12/04

Yesterday we didn’t spend so much time at school, instead we did a tour of three very different icons of Quintanar de la Orden. But not before visiting Casa Juan for a coffee or hot choco!

First of all we went to “Ibercacao” which is a massive chocolate factory and toured for an hour or so before heading to the newly built ‘Ayuntamiento’ (City Hall) and on to ‘La Casa de Piedra’ (The Stone House). The chocolate factory was super interesting and we saw the whole process of chocolate making from separating imported cacao-mass right through to pallets of finished product being shipped out to supermarkets around the world. City hall was a really new building, very rare to see massive government investment in anything these days here as the government really has its hands tied financially and we were treated to a tour which culminated in an overview of the local, state and national coats-of-arms, and then city hall presenting us all with our own copies of Don Quijote de La Mancha and a voucher for unlimited visits to the heated city pool for the duration of our stay, which were warmly appreciated by the kids. La Casa de Piedra is a stone home (small palace) that was built in the 1600s. The current owner (now well into her golden years whose husband has passed) is an heir to an enormous dairy concern here in Spain and actually lives in the house and maintains it. Apparently her husband did much of the internal woodwork and built much of the furniture within the house and they have invested considerable amounts of time and money restoring it to its former glory as well as preserving the original bits that have survived intact over the last 350 years. She is a lovely old lady who enjoyed having us every bit as much as we enjoyed being invited into her beautiful, big, old house. It took well over an hour for us to walk through the house and I think we would still all be there if she had had her way. The only room we weren’t invited to dwindle in was the one with the 200 year old billiard table and the HUGE portrait of Fransico Franco, under whose dictatorship her family obviously gathered a considerable fortune. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, please DO NOT ask a Spanish person what I am talking about. It is safer to just google it and draw your own conclusions as to what it might mean. After school, Parky, Tano and I went for a hike for about 3 hours to some old castle ruins. It was excellent.

Tuesday 2013/12/03

Yesterday was our first day at school; I.E.S. Alonso Quijano. Alonso Quijano was Don Quijote’s name before he changed it to Don Quijote. People here are mad and crazy fools for the Don (not Bradman). The woman with whom Don Quijote fell in love was from a village here and much of the book took place in the area. People here do not let the fact that it is fictional turn them off any more than the Kiwis do with the Hobbits. Actually, even though I jest ‘The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote of La Mancha’ is considered to be one of the founding pieces of modern Western literature.

Well that got off topic pretty quickly. It normally takes me at least more than a sentence to lose track of what I’m writing. Back to the top; Yesterday was our first day at school. All was good, the kids here are nice, the Waikerie kids are everything you would expect and just a little more, teachers are happy to have us and the weather has been beautiful (if 6*c above zero and clear blue skies are what you are in to. Lucky I am). We sat in on some classes yesterday, a couple of Ana’s English classes from the bilingual programme. Naturally they were packed with really high achieving students and they gave us presentations about the town, the region, Spanish sporting heroes, food, the grape harvest (the centre of all things Quintanar) and much more. The kids were great and their presentations were very informative and interesting. We had an IT lesson as well, which was a little hard to follow as my Spanish techno-vocabulary isn’t really up to speed, but nonetheless interesting. And in the evening we visited Quintanar de la Orden’s ‘School of Rock’. I kid you not. They have a certified rock school where you can become certified in rock guitar, drums, bass, keyboards, vocals or mixing. And because the school is a certified educational institution the qualifications from the School of Rock are valid for employment anywhere in Europe as a rock musician. The school is sponsored by Roland, which is a name anyone in music will be familiar with, and it is just a cool place. One of the exchange partners teaches drums there and he took us for a tour. Brilliant!

But I will have to say the highlight of my day yesterday was the last lesson for the day. We were placed in Tolan’s mum’s class. She is a math teacher and she has one class of only 11 students, all of whom are having trouble engaging with math and my guess would be also with education in general. Most classes have between 25 – 35 students here, so to only have 11 in a class gives you some indication of the level of need involved. It was my favourite experience of the day, and very short odds on being the most memorable for the trip, as it was the first time in the entire lives of any of the eight WHS students that they were the authority in their bilingual interaction. They were thrown into a conversation with a class of students with whom their (our students’) Spanish was functioning at a higher level than the English of the other participants. It is exactly what I was writing about yesterday and I cannot believe it has happened to them already. Our eight students were forced to communicate in Spanish because there were simply no other options available. It was amazing! I don’t know if our kids would have described the experience as amazing, probably unique or challenging or interesting, but for me it was incredible. After a slightly shaky start, I think they were waiting for the other kids to suddenly admit it was a set-up and they could actually speak English after all, they got right into it. A little prod here and a little help there and they were swapping Facebook details faster than you can blink. Very well done!

Sunday 2013/12/02

Just a quick note about language.  A response to an age old myth struck me yesterday. In fact, no one asked me the question and no-one repeated the myth. We were just sitting, chatting eating the freshly slaughtered pig, drinking obscene amounts of the local good stuff and having a good ol’ fashioned time of it all when it hit me. It hit me with all of the surety that ideas like this hit you when you have been … well, let’s say when your mind is at its most receptive to new and amazing ideas, and I was immediately and completely convinced by its veracity. The myth is that we, as native English speakers, don’t need to learn other languages as everyone else learns ours. Why bother? To this question I’ve never had the perfect answer. There are lots of good answers, but I now have the perfect one: One’s ability to engage in any social interaction is limited by the ability of the participants to communicate with one another. If one is always relying on the other participant to be able to communicate with them, then one’s ability to interact in any given situation is forever limited by the ability or the willingness of the other parties.

This may not bother you if your objective is to go to Paris for a few days, climb the Eiffel Tower, Walk through Notre Dame and continue on your Contiki tour. There will always be people willing to interact with you for cash in these situations. Where’s the hotel? Two tickets please. How much is a baguette and a blue and white horizontally-striped shirt? You know; that kind of thing. Learning a new language is not always practical either. If you are planning a once-in-a-lifetime trek through the Himalayas, you may be better off focussing your pre-trip energies on getting super fit or learning skills that might save your life. But I’ll tell you something for nothing, I had more fun yesterday than I have had since I-don’t-know-when, but spending an entire afternoon eating and drinking with 14 people whom I had never met before and with whom I had limited avenues of communication would be a very different proposition indeed.

2013/12/01

Today we woke up a little late and went to one bit of the national athletics championships in Quintanar. Then Parky and I went with Angela and Tano to their friends house for lunch. That was 2pm. It is now ten past eight. We just finished lunch. That's the Spain that I want to live in. That's the Spain that I have yet to experience. Estoy feliz. 

2013/11/30

Well, the general consensus is that you’d have to be a bit mad. So touch wood, cross fingers and hand me my lucky rabbit’s foot, ‘cause it’s way too late to back out now. We left Waikerie without near as much wailing and gnashing of teeth as one may have may have reasonably expected. We left on-time, we arrived in Adelaide on-time, we got a bite to eat, we bashed through customs like it wasn’t even there and we pitied the poor, excited fools who were inwardly buzzing with anticipation like nerds on the eve of the next Apple update, as they tried to maintain a sombre outward appearance for their sad relatives who stood silently weeping and texting on the other side of the sound proof glass that separates Those Who Have Been Through Customs and their loved ones who sadly won’t be joining them. I know most parents were dismayed when they were asked not to come to the airport, some were confused and some quite aggrieved, but had you paid witness to the hour and a half of pointless heartache experienced by Those on the Other Side of the Glass, and the effect their presence had on Those Who are Leaving you would now be painfully aware of the methods underpinning my madness.

I’ve never travelled with high school kids before, but I must say that I am heartily impressed and have been from the get-go. From the moment they were asked to start packing their suitcases into the bus the older boys immediately recognised the inherent discord of an anarchic system and on their own initiative formed a chain gang and loaded everyone’s baggage as passed to them through the door. I was impressed all over again just two hours later. Immediately upon arrival at the Adelaide airport, with everyone needing a trip to the loo after the bus ride, under their own steam the group recognised that taking suitcases into the cubicles was a bad strategy and divided themselves into those who were busting and those who could wait out the first round and therefore look after the bags. They found an unoccupied space that was not part of a thoroughfare, collected everyone’s bags in a little circle, dispatched the needy and the rest patiently did what needed to be done. They are only little things. I bet the kids themselves would be surprised at how impressed I am by these seemingly trivial events, but they are a huge insight into the way they are going to function as a group without instruction or immediate supervision. So without putting down the rabbit’s foot just yet, they are good signs and they make me feel slightly less mad for embarking on this journey.

Waikerie

Adelaide

Madrid