Mexico, cycling Britain, then Barcelona

day 15

http://www.gurneysjourneys.com/barthelona.htm

I think i’m nearly there. I went back to the good English teaching job and because they haven’t got any classes right now they have offered me a weeks work on a residential course. This is one of the strangest jobs i have ever heard of. From what I can gather, I go to a hotel in the mountains where there are hiking tracks and quad bikes, I get fed three hearty meals a day, including plenty of wine and baileys if i fancy it, and my only responsibility is to give English conversation lessons for four hours a day. In total there will be me, one other teacher, and just the one student! And for my trouble I get paid 700 euros!!! That’s a phenomenal wage. Plus, as i might have mentioned I am homeless at the moment. Does it sound too good to be true? We’ll see.

Today truly is a day of celebration; I got paid 34 euros for my flyering job! I have no idea how I wangled that. I went to the club to get paid and my contact Nadine, had been sacked. I was sent downstairs to an office and after accidentally walking into the kitchens I found a grumpy man sitting behind a desk smoking a cigarette. He bluntly asked me my name and then tried to give me 6 euros. This man had never set eyes on me before, and all he had was a list of names. Luckily I spoke enough Spanish to query the rate he had given me per flyer, and then somehow he recalculated it as 34 euros!! Result!

Then… I got to talk about GCSE Maths text books for half an hour with a lovely man called James. It turns out there are people in Barcelona looking for English speaking Maths tutors and they sometimes ring you out of the blue. Unfortunately, with my enthusiasm, I lost all business sense and not only gave him my advice over the phone for free, but also told him he could probably work through the text book without my help for the first few weeks. Hmmm.

All the bad news came from my friend’s boyfriend who, after being delayed at Gatwick for four hours was finally told that his flight was cancelled. He has been bussed to Brighton and is currently enjoying a few hours of sleep at the Ramada Inn. Guess which airline? Yup, Easyjet obviously.

day 5

http://www.gurneysjourneys.com/barthelona.htm

After rising early to send applications for “conference sales person” and “AVIS reservation agent”, including such terrible, desperate phrases as “I believe I would be a valuable addition to your team” the day was mostly spent wandering around Barceloneta.

At the Marina the tourists were milling around. Occasionally they would wander into the “100 years of Barcelona Buses” exhibition, but they would soon realize it was all in Catalan and not meant for them. At makeshift stalls black guys were selling  fake designer bags and sunglasses in between being chased off by the police. It is quite a spectacle watching how quickly they swoop up all the handbags, throw the sack over their shoulder and run off, only to spread them out on the ground again a few hundred meters down the road. If you are bargaining with them as the cops close in you can get a pretty good price.

The beach was filled with foreigners; gangs of English lads singing Happy Birthday and waving family sized bottles of beer, leachy, hairy men in small trunks chasing women, and loads of people were braving the apparently very polluted sea . We ate chorizo and bread and trawled through the rooms for rent in a classifieds paper. I have stepped up the search, I am now only going to see flats of genuine interest and I have a list of key questions to ask before viewing. Unfortunately no one is answering their phones today.

This is my last night in Ian’s flat, tomorrow I start paying 20 euros a night. We spent it watching the first half hour of “Y tu Mama Tambien” without subtitles. It does nothing for my confidence when I realize that although I claim to be an “advanced” Spanish speaker, I would only understand the dialogue if I sat inches away from the screen and had regular dictionary breaks and chances to regain concentration. That’s nowhere near fluent. Damn.