Thoughts on This and That

After getting in from Porto on, an unneccesarily long, 5 1/2 hour coach trip I´ve been in Salamanca for the last 24 hours or so, and it´s a great place.

For those who don´t know it´s a famous university town in just about the North of Spain, with fine buildings and monuments in terms of the universities, churches, two cathedrals, numerous convents, towers with excellent views and some Roman walls and bridges. These are all very nice, all very worthwhile and the city has a very relaxed feel to it.

None of those things however are the main sights to see here, they would be the women. Upon my arrival I noticed that there were scores of them and, after sitting in a bar and grabbing some lunch with a guy I met on the coach I concluded that there must have been 7 women passing by the window for every bloke we saw. Of those I´d say 5 would be young (ie my age or younger) and 4 would be attractive, great going and better ratios than any other place I´ve ever visited. This morning as I grabbed a coffee and a croissant I noted I was the only bloke in the bar with 14 girls in, so maybe my initial estimates weren´t so accurate, but I´m not complaining about that, and as I´ve wandered around today I have noticed that they all seem to hunt in large packs.

I´m beginning to think that this may be my kind of place, what I find even more encouraging is that the few women who seem to actually be with a guy are with odd looking characters, so even I have a chance, I guess the other blokes just play the field and enjoy the variety. One thing is for certain, I´ll be back here when the weather is better, the clothing is skimpier and hopefully coinciding with the end of exams so spirits should be high. I guess that gives me six months or so to learn a decent level of Spanish, lose some weight and then do something about the face!!!

Anyway I´m out of here tomorrow, heading for Leon then the Basque country - or maybe I´ll stay an extra day or two, who knows.

Well, here goes - I haven´t had much chance to get online over this last week or so, so this is going to be a bit of a mammoth update I´m afraid.

Last Tuesday I spent my last day (for now) doing my normal mooching around Madrid, in the evening a few of us who had taken part in the Pueblo Ingles program met up for a meal and a few drinks in an Asturian restaurant in the city. It was an enjoyable night, and it was good to see people outside the constraints of the course. After the meal a few of us more hardy souls ended up in Bar San Diego (or something like that) which is where the A-listers of the Madrid set are usually to be found, I didn´t feel at home, I´m still amazed I got in and I didn´t see anyone famous - only a few football journalists who had been covering the Real Madrid Champions League game.

The worst thing that happened on the night was one of my irrational fears about life in Spain being realised, I don´t worry about much but I am always concious of getting the whole cheek-kissing greeting and goodbye wrong. Whenever I sense it´s about to happen I tend to watch and learn while others get in there first before taking the leap - I managed to get through the first few without any problems but when I got round to Amy (American girl from Seattle previously mentioned for being on the Pueblo Ingles programme, doing my laundry, and from the day in Retiro Park) we managed to misread each others intentions and ended up making lip to lip, rather than cheek, contact. A simple misunderstanding perhaps, but not as big as her then sticking her tongue down my throat, which clearly isn´t the done thing (ok, that might not have actually happened until I was dreaming later on)!

As I walked back to the hostel from the last bar I managed to bump into a Danish guy who I´d met in Madrid about 15 months previously while he was staying in a hostel while in the city looking for work - we hadn´t stayed in touch and it was a totally random meeting, but we had to then catch up on what had been going on, which involved drinking in a bar just off the Gran Via until 5am which, usually, would have been fine - but I had to be up at 7 to head to the airport and catch my plane to Lisbon.

I made the plane without any problems, but it just meant that I was absolutely shattered by the time I arrived in Lisbon and the first day was pretty much a write off as I spent my time sleeping. That wouldn´t have been so bad apart from the fact that the next couple of days were mostly spent sheltering from the hideous rain which prevented much sightseeing. Darren flew in from London for a couple of days and we managed to see bits and pieces of the place, which seems nice enough, but will probably require a further visit in more favourable weather when I get the chance.

The one thing I can say with confidence about the place is that the 50´s are alive and well in parts of the Barrio Alto, which is the main area for nightlife in the city. Darren and I spent Friday night savouring a few bars in the area with some girls from our hostel and at about 330 am we headed back to Jurgens Bar, which had been the best bar we had visited earlier in the night. At the time of our first visit it had seemed quite a “cool” place with chill-out and dance type stuff being played, on our return we found the bar full of young Lisboeta´s with slicked back brylcreemed hair, turned-up jeans and the like dancing wildly to old “rock and roll” music, even the Stray Cats got an airing but the place really kicked off when Elvis hit the airwaves. It was bizarre watching it but it´s got me thinking that it might be worth a visit in 20 years time when they will have discovered punk.

On Saturday Darren and I went our separate ways as I´d agreed to go to Sintra with the aforementioned Amy who, after our first meeting in the hostel the day I arrived in Madrid, had conspired to follow me to Pueblo Ingles, to a different hostel afterwards, then pretty much everywhere else in Madrid and was now in Lisbon in my hostel - not that I mind, if you are going to be stalked an attractive 23 year old female is probably about as good as it gets - and it was well worth the trip.

The town was a haunt of the Portugese royal family back in the day and consists of a number of palaces and castles set in a beautiful part of the world up a bit of a hill. We arrived on the train from Lisbon and decided to walk to the main palace not realising it was 5km up the hill until we realised noone else was walking up the winding mountain road we were hiking up, and there was a steady stream of buses and taxis making their way past. It didn´t spoil the day, in fact it made it all the more fun, and it is a place I would heartily recommend to anyone - the rain also held off for us while we were there, which topped the day off nicely though we did get caught in yet another downpour after we got back to the city and went for something to eat.

So Sunday came around and it was time to leave Lisbon and I headed for Porto, no need to guess who I had for company on the bus, and after a bit of a struggle to find a hotel and get a room we headed out to discover the place. My first impressions were that it is more user friendly than Lisbon and, though smaller, has more of a bustle about it - which isn´t necessarily a good thing but makes the place seem more lively. We (I) spent the evening getting drunk while watching a succession of English, Spanish and Portugese football in a bar and when we finally dragged ourselves out of bed this morning we were once again greeted by the omnipresent Portugese rain; Sightseeing was a bit of a write-off again but we did manage to visit one of the wine cellars for the museum, tour and free Port samples and enjoy a nice lunchtime drink and bite to eat in a riverside bar.

Come 330 it was time for us to finally go our separate ways forever after three weeks as Amy headed off on an overnight train to France, so I spent the rest of the afternoon walking the streets in the rain, seeing what I could of the city and of course pining after the girl. As with Lisbon it seems a nice place with some great buildings and public places but I´d really like to be here in decent weather to do the place justice, it´s continued to absolutely throw it down into the evening hence I´m on here doing this and drinking Superbock, which is delightfully cheap in it´s home country but somehow tastes even better.

So when tomorrow comes I´ll be heading back to Spain and to Salamance before, probably continuing up and accross the North, then again if this rain keeps up I might find myself heading South and chasing some late year sunshine. It´s good to be free, but not so good to be saturated.

Before I travelled last year and had stayed in hostels I have to admit I was pretty wary of them, everyone has heard stories, everyone has their pre-conceptions, but apart from one or two incidents I haven´t had any real problems in them wherever I´ve been.

I still meet people, and talk to friends, who would like to travel more, but are put off by the fact that they would have to stay in hostels for financial reasons but don´t really want to, I´d strongly urge everyone to do it because they are, in the most part, nowhere near as bad as you think and usually lots of fun.

Take my last couple of days as an example, after my siesta on Sunday (I´m really getting into that now) I stumbled into the kitchen in my hostel for a glass of water, this was at about 630, there was an Australian girl, Suzanne in there and 5 and a half hours later we were being kicked out as the kitchen closed. During the course of the night we´d been joined by three other girls and we´d just spent an enjoyable evening chatting, exchanging travel (and other) stories and, as it turned out three of us were in Spain looking for work, links, information and contacts. I even managed to get a free meal out of the evening as the girls raided the cupboards for the food that had been left behind by departed backpackers and cooked up an interesting mix of pasta, rice, oatmeal and god knows what else. It required minimum effort on my part though, as a gent, I did volunteer to do the washing up. If I add my free meal to the fact that Amy took my washing to the laundrette on Saturday, as mentioned earlier, I can definitely say I´ve been onto a good thing these last few days.

Everyone apart from me was actually leaving the hostel yesterday so we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways in the morning, only to bizzarely end up bumping into each other by the gates of the Retiro park in the early afternoon. After that we went for lunch, did a little bit of sightseeing then headed back to the park where we spent the afternoon lounging around in the sun, chatting a lot more and drinking the occassional beer, hopefully I´ll have the pictures to follow at some point.

It was all good fun, made for a cheap night and day and is something that wouldn´t have happened if we´d all been locked away in our own hotel rooms somewhere. Most importantly of all, how else would I be able to get myself into a situation where I could spend so long in the company of four attractive young women (without paying for it)?!!

I’m knackered.

I’m currenty sat in an internet cafe in Madrid after last night arriving back from my week spent in the Salamanca countryside near a very nice small village called La Alberca taking part in what is best described as a language immersion programme. My week was spent speaking to Spaniards in a variety of situations, usually on a 1 to 1 basis but also in group activities and around the dinner table, with the odd visit to the bar! Very little teaching was involved, apart from the odd explanation and correction, but it did give me a bit of an insight into the processes of teaching and learning languages and I was suprised by the patience, understanding and tolerance I showed - as no doubt anyone who knows me would be!

I’m not completely sure I would do it again, although rewarding it was hard work, and maybe a day or two too long for me, but as an experience I am very glad that I chose to do it. In particular the one on one sessions were a great way of getting an insight into the lives of the Spaniards and something you don’t really get to do simply by spending time in a country, I’ve learned a few things that will help me get by while I am here, and maybe even made a few contacts that can help me in various ways, who knows. A wide range of subjects were discussed and it’s always interesting to get a fresh perspective on issues and, as those who know me will testify, impart my knowledge of matters onto others!

The English speaking people were, on the whole, great as well and there was a small core of people in particular who I got on very well with and we shared some great times. Everyone was very open, down to earth and easy to get along with - and, all in all, it was a great mix of nationalities, age groups and lifestyles, I’m sure there are few folk that I’ll keep in touch with and as we speak an American girl has taken my dirty washing to the launderette for me, which is nice, and I’ll even forgive her the fact she pronounces my name ‘awesome’ - not that I mind that too much anyway - folk have called me worse.

The one thing I will say is that it is suprisingly hard work talking practically non-stop for a full day, and my throat is in need of a nice long period of recovery and my head is a bit all over the place too, but it wasn’t all work, in fact fun is a word I’d use to describe the overall experience.

As well as taking part in a (wooden) sword fight in the streets of La Alberca, and being taken up to the top of a mountain by two members of the Spanish civil guard, alcohol figured strongly in the fun element and the earliest I got to bed during the week was 3.10 the latest 6 am and the norm somewhere between 4 and 5. As the day started at 8 it made things hard come the end of the week and is the reason I am so tired now, and maybe why I thought the programme was too long! Don’t believe all you hear about these Spaniards being wild party animals though. Yours truly was the last to bed each and every night, and I made it to breakfast every day too - I have to say I am delighted, and suprised, because I didn’t think I still had it in me, he says as he can barely keep his eyes open at the computer screen, the biggest bonus is I don’t think I did anything too embarassing although I best wait for the photos before I announce that as gospel.

So now, I’m free again which is just how I like it after being restricted to a schedule for seven whole days. I’ve scrapped the trip to Valencia this weekend because I am so shattered and I’ll spend the next few days relaxing in Madrid, meeting up with some of the people from the course and catching up on a few things. I head to Lisbon on Wednesday for a few days which should be fun, but after then who really knows….

Please accept my apologies if lots of this hasn´t made sense - the english of the Spaniards on the course may have improved, but I´m pretty sure it´s at the expense of mine!

Well so far I´ve eaten a lot of paella, drunk a lot of sangria and red wine, and done very little else. Which all sounds good to me, the six red wines I enjoyed with my lunch today haven´t gone down too well with my head, but since when did I ever use that?

The plan always was to potter around for these few days before heading off to the hills, and that´s exactly what I´ve been doing. Well that and going on a mad night out which ended with me finally crawling into bed at 615 this morning, but when in Rome and all that, I´ve also had the pleasure of the company of a couple of Aussie RL fans, so I´ve had plenty of opportunities to mention last Saturday, which has been a nice little bonus.

It was chucking it down when I arrived on Tuesday, and it seemed like it was never going to stop, I wasn´t properly prepared for the situation and came sin raincoat, so I set out yesterday aiming to rectify it. Buying a nice thin raincoat would surely be a simple enough task? Of course not.

The tendency of the Spanish to over-exaggerate things is perfectly summed up by the trouble I had trying to buy something to keep me dry. The temperature at the moment is hovering between 15 and 20 degrees during the day, warm enough? Not for the locals, who are out in their woolies and big winter coats even at the height of the day. It would seem wet is automatically corresponded with cold, and everywhere I went raincoats would automatically come with a thick lining. A trip down to the Vicente Calderon to buy an Atletico one proved fruitless, I had learnt the vocab, a raincoat is an “impermeable” but this didn´t stop the assistant trying to sell me a big trenchcoat, a winter bench jacket and then a tracksuit top before I eventually gave up. Six stores later I eventually found something that wouldn´t cause me to bake, then came the problem of buying it, I was queued for 45 minutes, which isn´t comfortable due to the locals strange concept of personal space (or lack of it) - the queue was so vast that people coming into the store in pairs were splitting up, one immediately queueing, while the other went round the store picking out what they wanted then coming into the line and swapping places. On numerous occassions I was tempted to forget it, but the lack of alternatives and the prospect of being soaked wasn´t appealing.

After finally buying it, then coming to the internet cafe sending emails and messages to folk whinging about the weather, the rain stopped and hasn´t been seen since. I´m not sure whether to laugh or cry. Still at least I´ve been able to indulge in my usual Madrid pastime of wandering around the Retiro

I´ve just been to an introductory lunch ahead of the programme I start tommorrow, everyone seems fine and it all seems simple enough. Some of the younger element of the participants are meeting up again later to eat and drink, so tonight should be fun as well, though I think I´ll lay off the sangria this time. It´s up bright an early for a 9 o´clock departure in the morning, then I´ll be oblivious to the outside world for a whole week, unless it all gets too much for me and I do a runner.

Find out more next week……

About this time on a Monday I’d be at work, fighting to stay awake and wondering just how much more fun it would be to climb onto the windowsill and hurl myself 50 feet to the ground, rather than sit there and continue to do my job. Thankfully Friday saw it all come to an end, my glorious five year spell as a civil servant is over - I was planning on writing a critique of Her Majesties Revenue and Customs, but now I’ve gone I just don’t want to waste my energy on the place. I’ll miss some of the people I’ve worked with, everything else about it can go to hell.

So tomorrow I set off to Madrid, easyjet flight 7101 from Liverpool at 1315 will speed me off to, well who knows, a new life possibly, a new career maybe - I’m happy to just relax for a bit and see what happens and how things pan out.

On Friday I head off to take part in Pueblo Inglés, literally English village, where I will basically spend the week interacting with, and talking to Spaniards in English, with the intention of improving their grasp of the language and getting to hear it as it is really spoken. They, or their employers, apparently pay thousands for these courses, I’ll get a hotel room and meals for a week out of it, not to mention some experience and the chance to make a few contacts. While it isn’t explicitly teaching English it should give me a bit of an insight into the process of teaching non-English speakers the language, and help me decide if it is a career route I can go down.

After that I’ll be travelling around Spain and Portugal for a couple of weeks - a weekend in Valencia (Levante v Atlético Madrid) is first up, then Lisbon, Porto, Castilla y Leon, and possibly the Basque country are all on the agenda before heading back to Madrid for two or three weeks, watching some football and trying to see if teaching is a goer. I’ve made a few contacts over there and they are all being more than helpful to ensure that I will get some experience of actually being involved in, and taking, lessons so I can get a true grasp of what it entails and see if it’s for me - it’s not all about what others are going to do for me though - I’ll also be going over armed with my walking shoes, C.V. and lesson plans that I’ve put together with the aim of picking up some freelance classes filling in here and there. Of course my exploits will be fully blogged, for your viewing pleasure!

I fly back from Barcelona on December 21 (Barcelona v Atlético on the 20th) and then, taking on board what has happened over these six weeks or so, it will be time to make some real decisions. Whatever happens, it will be more fun than sitting behind that desk day in, day out and nowhere near as soul-destroying.

There aren’t too many pubs worth visiting in Bradford nowadays and, after last night, it appears another one has gone down the pan.

When I’m at a pub I like to be able to have a drink, chat with the people I am there with and, if music is being played, I like it to be at a reasonable non-intrusive volume. That is the sort of atmosphere that has been enjoyed at The Head over the last few years, now it seems to have gone down the route of playing booming “dance” music as loud as possible on a Friday and Saturday night.

I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that at 9:15 last night, there were six people in the place, it always used to be pretty busy. I certainly won’t be back anyway.

After the heroics of the GB RL side this morning came the tame surrender of a Colin Todd inspired home Bradford City performance. Even with a right back at left back, a left back in midfield, and a midfielder at right back we still managed to fight back from a 2-0 deficit against Brighton - only to then sit back in the style of true Todd negativity and conceded a late goal to lose the game.

At least I won’t be around to see anymore of it over the next few weeks, hopefully by the time I come back Todd will have received his marching orders, but I won’t hold my breath.

Great Britain recovered from last weeks defeat against New Zealand to beat the Aussies 23-12 in Sydney this morning in our second Tri-Nations game. OK, the Aussies weren’t great, they made changes and have already qualified for the final but it is still our first win down under since 1992, and marks a significant improvement on the 64-10 defeat we suffered on our last trip there. It was particularly sweet after the over the top reactions from the Aussies to this innocuous column, as shown here, here and here, not to mention in other places in the Aussie media.

After my leaving do yesterday (more of that later) I was unable to haul myself out of bed and get somewhere to watch the game at 9am, but I listened on the radio and was ecstatic when we scored the late try to clinch the game. So ecstatic that I forgot my knee related woes and wildly jumped around the flat, I’m suffering for it now but who cares? As a British Rugby League fan there is nothing better than beating that lot, particularly on their own turf. I’ve had a quick search through the DVD at the highlights and I’ll settle back later with a beer to watch the whole thing.

I’m not saying we are going to win the competition, I won’t even go as far as saying we’ll make the final, but it was a proud performance today and hopefully we can go on from here.

I don’t know if there is something in the air or not but, whatever the reason, two members of my family (my grandad and my youngest sister) managed to end up in Bradford Royal Infirmary last weekend.

We’ve probably all read the stories about MRSA, the poor standards of hospital cleanliness and the like but I always imagined a lot of it to be a bit overblown and overhyped, as is often the case with media reporting in this country. How wrong could I be?

The ward my Grandad was in was fine, no problems there, I visited him first then went up to see my sister on the ward she was on, the best way to describe the place is filthy. There was dried blood on the wall that had been covered up with a curtain, that was dirty around the edges, flies buzzed around the window and dust was clearly visible on the light fittings overhead. It was the sort of thing I wouldn’t find acceptable in the dodgiest student house, nevermind a hospital ward.

Given the whole MRSA affair, and the fact there are posters all over the hospital advising you to take care to try and prevent any further spread I thought I would make use of the hygienic hand rub which is provided via dispensers at the entrance to each ward. No-one seems to bother using it, even though the advice is that all staff, patients and visitors should, but now I probably know why not. As I pressed the button to dispense it I was asked by a nurse, in an accusatory tone “what do you think you are doing?”. You’d have thought I was an escaped addict rifling through the pharmacy, not someone trying to be hygienic on a hospital ward.

That brings me nicely on to the standard of nursing which was, at best, mediocre. My sister was on a drip for some time, this was attached to her right hand but the apparatus was put on the lefy side of her bed, meaning she could hardly move without the thing almost toppling over as the feed was stretched. My mum ended up writing my sisters name on her name-plate as it was left blank for more than 24 hours, while doctors came and went studying her notes. A nurse was asked to do it but informed her that “it isn’t my job, I will get someone else to do it” the someone else obviously never did it.

My grandad was later moved to a different ward where he was put away, and forgotten about, in his own room at the end of the ward (complete with tea and coffee stains on the walls). He asked for a fresh jug of water to take his medication with, six hours later this hadn’t been received and he was using a jug that had been there for the best part of two days, he also asked for an extra pillow which wasn’t forthcoming until my mum went into the linen room and got one out herself. In the room my grandad was moved to he had no television, radio or anything to keep him occupied - there was a socket for some headphones to receive the radio but standard sets didn’t work and the nurses couldn’t find any suitable equipment for him to use. We asked if he could use a radio or television brought in from home but were informed that such appliances would have to be checked by the electrician, and we’d have to wait until he did his rounds, whenever that may be.

On a more serious note my grandad’s notes showed he has medication that he has been taking regularly for years but he didn’t have this on him when he was admitted to the hospital. Rather than get some from the pharmacy on site the fact he didn’t have this was just ignored, when challenged about this the nurse said “well, patients usually bring their own from home”. To top it all off when I was messing around with the headphone sockets I accidentally set off the response alarm, it took me 90 seconds to figure out how to switch it off and, in that time, precisely no staff came to check what was going on. Heaven forbid it was actually pressed for a genuine reason.

I’m sure the vast majority of nurses are good at what they do, and have a well developed sense of patient care and I’d like to think that the vast majority of hospital wards are clean and hygienic places to recuperate however, after the experience of this week, I’d like to think if I ever get in a situation where I need to be admitted to a hospital again, it won’t be Bradford Royal Infirmary.