Lagoons, windmills, and castles, oh my!

In the second half of last week, I was working with the infantiles. That means I read them a story, because I do the same thing with them every time I see them. I can't argue with what works, and they always yell "Sí!" when the teacher asks if they liked the story. I still wonder how much they understand, since it's in English, of course, but usually I'm reading them stories that are familiar to them in Spanish as well. Last week, it was The Three Little Pigs, or Los Tres Cerditos. Apparently this story is a favorite among Spanish children, so I was happy that they were excited about it.

In my after school lessons, I'm getting better at coming up with activities, but I still struggle with the six-year-olds. I like to over-prepare for those classes because of their short attention spans, and we burned through 5 different activities in one class. I think I'm just going to have to repeat activities pretty often with them, because I can't possibly come up with 5 different things for every class. At least I know that repetition is key to learning, especially a language, so maybe it's for the best. For my lovely class of fifth- and sixth-graders, we played sentence race, in which they drew a word from a bag that I had prepared and had to use it in a sentence. The first team to come up with a correct sentence got a point. They actually really liked it, and we played for the whole class.

The high school lessons continue to be a piece of cake. They are really motivated and fun, and one of my classes last week, the only one with just girls, simply wanted to chat for the whole hour. They made jokes about their friends having ugly boyfriends and we talked about movies and they asked me questions about the United States. It was a breath of fresh air, because the elementary lessons are so much work, and it reminded me of hanging out with my friends from home (despite the fact that these girls are 13 and 14, but age is just a number, right?).

Friday was an interesting day for me. I wrote in last week's blog about looking forward to having a weekend without traveling, but it had slipped my mind that I had an appointment in Toledo to get my tarjeta de identidad extranjera, or my foreign identity card. I have a visa to be in Spain, but I'm actually here on a student visa, which only lasts three months. So in order to stay in the country legally for the duration of the program, I have to get the identity card. It's a pain, of course, because nothing in Spain is easy. So I prepared the mountain of paperwork required for the appointment (which still wasn't as bad as applying for my visa, but I digress) and boarded the bus to Toledo.

My appointment was for 12:50 but I got to the office at 11:00 and they gave me a number, deli-counter style, so I only waited for about 15 minutes before they called me in. I brought in my pile of paperwork, the lady stamped some things, and I was on my way back out the door in another 10 minutes. If only it was that easy, I would have been thrilled. But apparently, the next step is that I will receive a special paper in the mail, and once I receive that, I have to go back to Toledo and get fingerprinted. Then and only then will I be able to get my card. I'm sighing even as I write this. Spanish bureaucracy and red tape is such a pain in the neck.

But thankfully, the appointment was quick, so I just managed to make the 12:00 bus back to Quintanar. My friend Vicki and I had decided to have lunch, and we were going to a Chinese restaurant. I was excited at the prospect of trying Chinese food in Spain. Normally, I'm sure Morgan would have come with us, but she actually went home for the weekend for her cousin's birthday. I was pretty jealous that she could go home for the weekend, but Chinese food was my consolation, so I couldn't be too upset.

So Vicki loves the Chinese place and has been there before, so she knew that we could order from the Chinese buffet. This restaurant's version of a buffet is different from every other buffet I've ever been to, but I enjoyed it more because of it. I kept thinking of my mom because she hates buffets, namely because "the food is always cold." Well, for this particular buffet, we ordered from a waitress and she brought us small portions of a bunch of different things direct from the kitchen. I think I ate enough to feed two people, but it only cost €10. Admittedly, I think Chinese food is better in the U.S., but I might be a little bit biased.

After we left the Chinese place, we hung out at Vicki's apartment and watched a movie. I called it an early night because I was tired from my first busy week of 10 lessons, and because we had made plans for the next day.

We decided that on Saturday, we were going to go to Consuegra. A few weeks ago, I wrote in my blog about our impromptu trip to Campo de Criptana, which is where many famous molinos, or windmills, are. Well, Consuegra is also very famous for their windmills. They have even more windmills than Campo de Criptana (12 in all), and there is also a castle on the hilltop right near the windmills. Much of the castle was destroyed in the Peninsular War in 1813, but a lot of it has been restored and reconstructed.

Roadtrip to Consuegra!

I was looking forward to seeing the other famous site of the Don Quijote windmills, but probably my favorite part of the day was a surprise that Vicki's fiance, Luis Felipe, gave us on the way to Consuegra. We stopped for lunch on our way in Villafranca de los Caballeros, a small town that has a beautiful laguna, or lagoon. I would probably call it a lake, which is lago in Spanish, but laguna has a sort of mystical quality to it, so I can't say I was complaining. I didn't realize that there was somewhere so close that people could go swimming. It seems like a mirage in the middle of La Mancha, because the land is so dry otherwise. I'll only be here until May, but I'm definitely going to keep it in mind if I'm craving a swim when the weather warms up again. We had lunch at a little place right on the water, and the view was lovely as we gorged ourselves on another huge lunch (Huge as in four courses. How do Spanish people stay so thin?).

View of La Laguna de Villafranca de los Caballeros from our lunch spot

Don Quijote, Luis Felipe, and me

The three of us at the edge of the laguna

When we finally finished eating, we resumed our trip to Consuegra. Luis Felipe had told me that he liked the windmills in Campo de Criptana better, and now that I've visited both, I understand why. I think that the view of the town below is better at Campo de Criptana, but the Consuegra windmills are more impressive somehow, probably because there are so many of them--and of course, there's the castle. That might have had something to do with it.

We toured the inside of the castle, and my favorite part was la cisterna, or the cistern. I really wish I had pictures of this to show you. This castle was, of course, a Moorish castle, and they figured out a way to store water in the castle because La Mancha is so dry (Apparently the Moors also called La Mancha "la seca," which literally means "the dry."). So they created this cistern to store water, and it's the coolest thing. The room itself was huge, and they painted it with a special chemical mixture of a bunch of seemingly bizarre things, including sand, iron, and a bunch of other things that turned the walls red but it kept the water fresh. So basically it was a room that they used like a well, and I just thought it was really innovative and fascinating, because the castle was built in the 10th century. The fact that we were able to enter into the cistern is a new development; when they built it, they walled it off and hauled water out of a hole in the ceiling. They even had a system to drain the water if they needed to. It was fascinating (As a side note, there was another, smaller cistern that they turned into a prison. Just the thought of being thrown in a well-room is enough to give me nightmares for a week.). 

My least favorite part of the castle, however, were the stairs. I can't seem to catch a break when I visit castles and their staircases. My childhood penchant for falling down whole flights on a regular basis seems to have come back to haunt me. These stairs weren't crowded, thank God, but there were three different "staircases" that were just pieces of wood fit into the cement wall. As in, the were completely unsupported on one side. They had a support beam under them but it was very little comfort to me, as a very large person. I took one look at it and just imagined myself crashing through the step and splattering on the stone below. When I pointed it out to Vicki, she had the audacity to wiggle one of them to see how secure it was. Let's just say it didn't make me feel any better. However, I made it up and down all three of them without another near-death experience, so I consider the visit a success.

After we left the castle, we went in another windmill, which looked the same as the windmill we visited two or three weeks ago. So then we made another quick trip to the next town over, Urda, because they have a really lovely church called La Iglesia de San Juan Bautista, or Saint John the Baptist Church. After we checked out the church, we headed back to Quintanar.

I had a mostly lazy Sunday, which is my favorite kind of Sunday, except that I had a presentation to prepare for the philosophy class I was going to on Monday. The teacher had asked me to prepare a lesson without giving me much other direction, so I chose pragmatism. Pragmatism is a branch of philosophy that I actually understand, because at its most basic level, pragmatists value practical knowledge above all else. So I applied it to a school setting, because I knew that would help the students understand. It's funny when you think about how many useless things we learn in school, so incorporating pragmatism in educating makes a lot of sense. The students seemed to really enjoy my presentation (and they laughed at all of my jokes), so I was happy with how it went. And the teacher was too, and he asked me to do another one in two weeks.

For the latter half of my week in the elementary school, I'm preparing a lesson about fairy tales, and anyone who knows me knows that they are one of my favorite things. So I'm looking forward to sharing fairy tales in English, because most if not all of them have a Spanish counterpart. It should be interesting, as well as fun!