Just over five weeks ago, I landed in Málaga, my home for the next nine months. Greeted by scorching thirty-degree heat, I couldn’t help but feel a great sense of novelty as I sat at a beachside bar alongside my new flatmate/co-worker with a crisp pint of Estrella Galicia. In the month since, my outlook has become a touch more nuanced (as you’d hope it would be), but that’s not to say I’ve lost the appreciation of a totally different lifestyle that I had when I first arrived. Here’s a quick(ish) summary of what’s happened so far.
Better late than never
As with all things involving foreign affairs these days, the wonderful effects of post-Brexit bureaucracy really had their say. Having my visa application pushed back by weeks due to admin issues, only for said documents to then jeopardisejeopardize the visa due to improper wording, was not the best way to end the summer. Given how much later my placement was starting compared to the majority of my year abroad friends, I had to watch them living their lives abroad while desperately scrabbling around for a new GP to write me a medical certificate (which then had to be legalisedlegalized and translated into Spanish, of course).
In the end, however, all was resolved; I saved my visa from cancellation with about an hour and a half to spare, a luxury given I had momentarily feared that it would go down to the minute. Having questioned whether my year abroad was ever going to start, I was finally setting off for sunny Málaga, starting my placement a week late but with plenty of time to get registered with the various authorities. Some advice for those going abroad next year: try your absolute utmost to find a European relative that can finesse you an EU passport, it’ll save you the nightmare of the visa process.
Vamos a la discoteca
Málaga is a bit of a party city. That’s probably the simplest way of describing it. Even at the start of October, the city centre was still swarming with tourists, mostly Dutch (taller, slicked back hair), English (shorter, wider, louder), or American (louder still, more obnoxious); I can only imagine the state of things during peak season in July and August. The plethora of bars and clubs (which, unfortunately, reps constantly pester you to visit on the street) is the main feature of the city centre. The sheer multitude of options, alongside the general vibrancy of the place, makes it all too easy for “a couple of drinks in the centre, nothing major” to turn into a full-blown night out. Me and some of my friends here have all too quickly learned the dangers of accidentally overdoing it on a Thursday night (we have Fridays off work).
That brings me to how I spent my Halloween weekend. Some of my friends had recently turned twenty-four, and wanted to do a twenty-four-hour celebration in Barcelona that weekend. However, just days before, I had arranged to visit some friends from college in Madrid the same weekend (shoutout to Queen’s College Spanish Gang), leaving me in a bit of a dilemma.
I love Barcelona, having spent a week there the summer before with friends from home, and the opportunity to go back felt too good to pass up. So instead, I crafted a compromise: fly out to Barcelona on Thursday night, celebrate on Friday, then get a six-thirty am train to Madrid (thus saving a night’s accommodation). And that’s exactly what happened. I got to Barcelona, I day-drank, I night-drank, I went to Razzmatazz (the biggest club in Barcelona), then all of a sudden it was five am and I had to get an uber to the train station, via the AirBnB to get my things. I got on the train, dozed for about an hour, and arrived in Madrid just after nine, delirious and probably still a bit drunk after the antics in Barca.
After reuniting with my Oxford friends at the hostel – who looked in equal parts amazed and concerned – I realised I was too wired to sleep, and so we set about exploring my third city of the weekend. As the day went on, I miraculously managed to find a second wind (or third or fourth wind at this point), meeting a friend from home who is living in Madrid this year. The whole group of us even ended up going on a much-later-than-expected bar crawl. After a Sunday of taking it easy and exploring Madrid’s extremely chaotic flea markets, my rather unhinged tribute to the cities of El Clásico came to an end as I took the long train home to Málaga in time for work the next morning.
Working hard or…
My placement consists of a Language Assistantship at a school in the nearby town of Torremolinos. In short, what this translates to is that I’m a teaching assistant, but the only ‘assistance’ I’m needed for is being a native English speaker. I have no responsibility to care for the children, nor am I to lead a lesson unsupervised. This was made very clear to us by the Andalucian education board, who seem set on giving me as little responsibility as possible.
I can’t speak for people doing British Council placements in other parts of the world, but things are pretty unserious where I work. The relaxed Spanish stereotype, especially in the South, really does ring true. I turn up for fourteen hours a week over four days – consisting of three lessons per day, with one longer day per week having five lessons – and often don’t do much more than read out parts of a textbook with a “perfect” English accent (trying my best to ignore my inner South-East Londoner and pronounce all my ‘T’ sounds properly), or maybe try to explain some vocab or grammar when needed.
I spent my first two weeks introducing myself to each new class, giving a repetitive spiel about where I’m from and what I like doing, before being asked a series of questions which became all the more monotonous and predictable by the twentieth time I did it: I have a pet dog named Belle; my favourite Spanish football team is Barcelona (often controversial given the sizeable Real Madrid contingent at the school); I prefer tortilla without onions (even more controversial); and no, I don’t have a girlfriend. I was also asked a lot if I had ever been surfing, which at first confused me, before realising that my increasingly long hair paired with my inclination towards baggy t-shirts and jorts in hot weather really does give that vibe.
It can be a mixed bag teaching between the ages of 12 to 16. The primeros, fresh out of primary school, are a manic bundle of energy who revel in the novelty of someone from the UK being in class. I seem to have obtained some sort of celebrity status, being greeted by cheers and high fives every time I enter class (one boy even asked me for an autograph!). Lessons can be carnage at times. In fact, my first class at the school was with this group, and I remember the chaos of constant noise, pencil cases and rubbers flying around the room, making me think I had walked into a Spanish version of Educating Essex.
At the other end of the spectrum, the cuartos are your typical moody teenagers. I don’t get a lot out of them most of the time, and neither does the teacher. There is one class in that year I get on well with, though. One student, thinking I wouldn’t be able to understand what she said, tried to make a joke about me and was left mortified when I called her out on it (surprisingly, many Language Assistants out here speak minimal Spanish, so having someone with university-level Spanish is rarer than expected). Returning her joke in Spanish left the class both laughing and surprised. Since then, at least, I seemed to have gained their respect.
One month in
Things have changed a bit since that glorious first day here in Málaga. It is no longer thirty degrees – that only lasted about a week – but twenty degrees in mid-November is hardly anything to complain about. The crisp pints of Estrella Galicia remain, though I do sometimes dabble in other local brews like Águila and Victoria. Meanwhile, my love of the beach remains unwavering; I realised the other day whilst sauntering around, long-haired and backwards-baseball-cap-adorning, that I am only a surfboard away from being cast in the next series of Outer Banks.
The main thing I have noticed, though, is how utterly different the pace of life is. My workload is next to nothing, particularly when compared to the relentless onslaught of essays during an Oxford term, and my social circle is a lot smaller compared to university life. In a way, the days often feel emptier, and I have spent a lot more time in my own company. But I have started to embrace this slower, more relaxed pace of life.
Such could not be truer right now. As I write this, the streets below me are being flooded by a storm, the joys of what is now a five-day weekend countered by an increasing onset of cabin fever. Still, considering the tragedies of the Valencia floods just two weeks ago, and how much less severe the ones in Málaga are by comparison, I count myself lucky. I’m sure it won’t be too long before I’m back at the beach with a beer in my hand.
The post Málaga Maketh Man: a month navigating life in Spain (ft. beaches, a triple-city weekend, and flash-flooding) appeared first on The Oxford Student.