After a week of feeling particularly irritated by my students (someday I’ll blog about school), I was ready for some time off the grid. A few of the auxiliars had planned a trip to La Graciosa, a small and lightly populated island just north of Lanzarote which is only accessible by ferry. I use the word “planned” in the loosest sense, because our trip was an exercise in near misses from start to finish. I’ve made the mistake of going on a poorly planned camping trip once before—it’s how I ended up alone in the Indiana woods with nothing but a tent and two apples—but I still trust in the benevolence of the camping gods. This time it really paid off because despite our laissez-faire approach to camping, we ended up having a GREAT time!!

The madness started when I came back from work on Friday afternoon, the day we planned to depart for La Graciosa, and checked the bus schedule for the first time… only to discover that there was only ONE bus from Arrecife to Orzola (the town where the ferry leaves from) and it was leaving in ONE hour. I called my friend Sarah who called our friend Tyler and we started scrambling, just making it to the station in time for the bus to Orzola. In Orzola we missed the ferry by a few minutes, but it wasn’t such a tragedy because the ferries leave every hour. After scoring a residents’ discount on ferry tickets, we sat down to a nice dinner… where we ordered three grilled fish and had to scarf down our food when it finally came out, or risk missing another ferry.

Over the course of dinner we received some news from our friend Sebastian that really threw us for a loop. Sebastian is a second-year auxiliar, so he’s basically our guardian angel who teaches us about the island. Sebastian was also the owner of the bulk of the camping equipment, and we were really counting on his expertise. Sebastian and his co-teacher Pilar were planning to meet us on La Graciosa about an hour or two later, but on their way to meet up with us Sebastian’s roommate called and told him his cat seemed sick. Being the excellent cat dad that he is, Sebastian turned his car around and went home to take his sweet baby to the vet, promising Sarah, Tyler, and me that he would make it in time for the last ferry. As we scarfed down our grilled fish in preparation for a thirty-minute boat ride, the mood was grim. We felt in our souls that Sebastian would never make it in time. We were truly alone against the forces of nature.

Whiskey Biscuits

Nevertheless, we pressed on—we had made it too far against too many odds to turn back. Despite the uncertainty, I am incapable of being unhappy on a boat, and I was positively giddy as we made our way across the choppy waters. This was my first time seeing the northern side of Lanzarote, and I was in awe of the contrast between the white sandy beaches in the south and the towering cliffs in the north.

When we arrived in the tiny town that is the main population center of La Graciosa, it almost felt like we had entered a movie set. There are no paved roads anywhere on the island, and the local community is so close-knit that we almost felt like we were being watched. We later learned that the island is basically controlled by three families—I can’t say anything more without putting myself at great personal risk (cough mafia cough). Locals directed us to the market where we stocked up on an odd assortment of food before making our way to our beachfront campsite.

We set up our tent, spread out a blanket, and broke out our odd assortment of food. Our snack ended up being chocolate-covered biscuits and whiskey in a bowl because we didn’t think to bring cups or any type of normal food. These circumstances became the inspiration for our band Whiskey Biscuits—check out our EP Skinny Dippin’, available at a record store near you in Spring 2020.

As the sun dipped below the horizon and our true lack of appropriate camping gear began to set in, a miracle happened—Sebastian and Pilar had made the last ferry! Sure enough, in thirty minutes our saviors came through with three additional tents, coolers full of real food, musical instruments, and games. We settled in for a night of singing and laughter and gratitude to the benevolent camping gods.

Climb Every Mountain

On Saturday morning I was possessed by the spirit of Monet and painted a few masterpieces. I rarely do anything artsy because I don’t feel like I’m good at it, but this year I have plenty of time to cultivate hobbies and I want to focus on enjoyment over skill. Judge my paintings however you want, but I had FUN making them!

After some coffee and recovery from sleeping on sand with no padding (somehow that sand was harder than concrete), we were ready for the real adventure. We hiked all the way across the island to a secluded spot full of tidepools, then to the more famous Playa de Las Conchas. I will let the pictures speak for themselves:

After a delicious lunch at Playa de Las Conchas, all thanks to Sebastian and Pilar of course, Sarah and I were still craving more adventure. We decided to climb the volcano nearest the beach—a steep and gravelly trail that was pretty hard on my aging knees. The climb was well worth it because there was a beautiful view and a surprise at the top.

In a plastic box at the summit, there was a guest book with notes and signatures from visitors all over the world. Sometimes, it really hits me how far away from home I am. It’s almost like the Google Earth app in my brain (y’all know that technology is just around the corner) zooms out and I see myself on this tiny island off the coast of Africa, so tiny it barely registers on the map. I get a rush that’s almost like vertigo, and making it to the top of this volcano was one of those times. Looking out at the desolate landscape of La Graciosa, I really felt present. Unlike other famous volcanic archipelagos, there is no vegetation here to soften the edges of a landscape shaped by fiery volcanoes, crashing waves, and fierce winds. The book in my hands held years’ worth of memories, but the landscape holds a story that goes back countless millennia. To take it all in, to consider how long it took for the earth to shape this magical island, and to recognize how fragile it all is in the face of human activity truly took my breath away. Unfortunately, my spiraling thoughts about geology were interrupted by biology because I suddenly had to ~go~ worse than I ever had in my life. And because there is NOT A SINGLE TREE on the whole dang island my only choice was to power walk all the way back across the island, leaving my friends in the dust.

The Treasure at the End of the Rainbow is Friendship

We were promised a desert island, but on Sunday morning it began to pour rain. The storm caught us off guard, but we were also treated to a double rainbow. If you haven’t seen the classic “double rainbow” YouTube video, look it up now and you’ll get a sense of how excited we were. We took off running down the beach, seeking to catch the end of the rainbow. It turns out that there are some scientific reasons that you can’t actually reach the end of the rainbow, but we found something better than treasure—friendship!!

If you thought that rainbows only came after a storm, you’d be wrong, because the rain started pouring down even harder after our rainbow excursion. This is when the fun became “Type 2 fun,” the type of fun that entails suffering in the moment but makes for fun memories later. Also, we had again failed to check any bus or ferry schedules and realized that if we wanted to get back to Arrecife at a reasonable hour we had to rush to pack up all of our stuff in the pouring rain. Setbacks aside, we made it home in one piece. Wet, cold, and tired, but in one piece. I felt like I had been away from Arrecife for weeks. La Graciosa has an air of magic that took me outside the normal flow of time, and I already know my weekend there will be one of my favorite Canary Island memories.

The great wordsmith and internationally acclaimed rapper Pitbull once said:

“You can’t catch me boy
I am overseas at about a hundred Gs for sure
Don’t test me boy (don’t test me boy) ’cause I rap with the best
Fo’ sho three oh five to the death of me
Cremate my body let the ocean have what’s left of me
But for now forget about that
Blow the whistle, baby you’re the referee”

I’m not totally sure what he meant, but I thought it would be a great intro to this post about ~international love~

Now that I’ve been on the island for about a month, I’ve already had the chance to go through my full cycle of downloading dating apps, going on a few dates, getting overwhelmed, deciding it’s just not a good time for me to date, deleting my apps, and cutting off all ties with the people I’ve been seeing. While this pattern was established long ago, it’s been fun to experience it through the added lens of cultural/ language differences!

Based on the limited experiences of me and my few other American friends on the island, dating abroad is just as much of a minefield as dating in the US. From what we’ve seen, the boys tend to move fast here—I went on a second date with a native Lanzarotean who told me he had already stopped using dating apps and didn’t want to meet other people. My friend went on a date with a Spanish guy from the mainland who was here for a job interview, and afterwards he told her he was moving his flight back by a week to spend more time with her. We’ve also encountered some sketchballs who won’t tell us their last name or refuse to meet up in a group setting—basically all of the normal precautions of internet dating apply, but it can be harder to get a read on someone’s intentions when there is a language barrier. At the end of the day we are all very thankful for the location-sharing feature on Whatsapp.

A Case Study: That time I dated Mr. Lanzarote 2015

For a few weeks I had consistently gone on dates with a native Lanzarotean who didn’t speak any English. He was more handsome than anyone I ever expected to date in my life (he won a male beauty pageant!!), but fortunately for me he loves redheads and has limited options on the island. Spending time with him was a great way to push my Spanish skills because I couldn’t resort to using English, but it also left me feeling strangely un-seen. So much of my self-perception rests on my humor, my intelligence, and my ability to connect with others. With my passable but limited Spanish, I don’t feel like any of those things come across. While I was able to make him laugh, it was more often good-natured teasing about my grammatical errors than appreciation of a joke I had made. It made me wonder what aspects of my personality were coming through, and if someone who didn’t speak my language could ever really know me. I also stressed about running out of things to talk about due to my limited vocabulary, and I wonder if he felt like he had to dumb himself down to make sure I was understanding him.

Aside from the language barriers, a few factors came up that ultimately led me to break things off with my Spanish model fake boyfriend. It is hard to separate which factors came down to cultural differences and which came down to temperament and personality. At first I felt smitten by his old-school chivalrous courting, but it quickly began to feel like too much, too fast. I also felt spooked by his apparent lack of social connections on an island where he has spent his entire life—maybe he’s an extreme introvert but it just gave me a bad feeling. I trusted my gut and decided to look elsewhere for my Spanish romance.

Going forward, I’m curious to see what possibilities there are for developing a relationship with someone who doesn’t speak English as a first language. Obviously, intercultural and interlingual (did I make up this word?) couples exist, and I only had a very brief attempt at making it work. Ideally, I suppose if I were to date someone who only spoke Spanish it would be someone who I had more in common with to start with (like, not a model bodybuilder who doesn’t drink or go to restaurants or socialize in any way), and my language skills would grow as my comfort level and sense of connection grew. Anyways, the experience was fun and I learned a little bit about what to expect from dating in Spain!

At least I’ve made some friends tho

Aside from my mixed success with dating, I’ve already cultivated a pretty active social life—the other English auxiliaries are all really great, and we’ve been exploring Arrecife and other parts of the island together quite a bit. The other weekend, a group of us went to Teguise market. This was my first time seeing the interior of the island, and the views were stunning. The landscape is so arid, getting into the mountains and away from the beaches really brings it home that this is a volcanic desert island—I’ve never seen anything like it before! Teguise is a small town in the mountains that has a massive Sunday market that draws locals and tourists alike. I was surprised and delighted by the size of the market. It reminded me of Usaquén in Bogotá, with a mixture of local artisans, kitschy imported goods, prepared foods, and more. One visit wasn’t enough to take it all in, and I’m looking forward to more Teguise trips—not to mention showing it off when I host visitors!

Week two of school, and almost a full month since I arrived in Spain… the excitement is still strong, but I am also starting to run into frustrations and roadblocks that are typical of living abroad. Why are the banks never open? Why am I still so bad at Spanish after over a decade of studying the language? Why do I keep signing up for loosely-structured teaching programs when I know I don’t want to be a teacher in the long term? (Well, that last one might be a little more specific to me.)

Don’t get me wrong– the island is beautiful, my students are great and I’m able to enjoy them much more as an assistant than I was as a lead teacher. However, that doesn’t diminish the things about this experience that are challenging and lonely and unfamiliar. I had hoped to make instant connections with other teachers, but instead find myself in the teachers lounge smiling quietly while straining to keep up with fast-paced Spanish conversations. I had hoped to somehow immediately have dozens of Spanish friends who would keep me constantly entertained and help hone my language skills, but instead find myself spending time alone or with the small group of Americans who are here as auxiliares de conversación like me (granted they are all very cool). I had hoped to find an engaging side project that will help me get a better sense of what sort of career I want to build after this, but instead I am finding that the organizations most likely to take me as a volunteer are after-school programs for students.

As I seek to ground myself in the moment and remind myself that feeling comfortable in a new place takes time, I have been thinking a lot about my grandfather who died two years ago this week. My grandfather, Mike Reardon, was an enigma to me when I was growing up– so much so that he earned the nickname Grandpa Grump, and it sticks to this day. My grandpa was eccentric to say the least, and it felt hard to connect to him as a little kid. However, despite his oddball nature I always loved visits to his apartment in DC because it was full to the brim with artifacts from all around the world. After a career in the State Department and in a few other private companies that brought him all over the world, he continued to spend his retirement traveling. I think I’m not exaggerating when I say that my grandfather had been to over 100 countries, but I’ll have to fact check that with my dad. I remember seeing instruments from Russia and Jamaica, masks from various African and South Asian countries, small carved statues from who even knows where. He brought me dresses from China and Ghana. One year, to my horror, he gave my younger brother a hand-carved blowdart from Brazil. Most of all, I remember the curiosity and sense of adventure I felt when I looked at the huge map in his hallway with pins in all the places he’d been and the places he still wanted to go. Without knowing it, he showed me that the world is a big place– and I wanted to see all of it.

As I grew older and expressed an interest in studying international relations, I began to develop a real relationship with Grandpa Grump. The man who had seen so many interesting things was finally interested in me, and he loved to hear about my classes and my interest in Latin America. He would forward me emails that he got from the State Department retiree network with news and information about events around the city. He was a YouTube documentary enthusiast, and he was always sharing the weird and random things he learned and thought about. He was even excited for me when I decided to accept my offer to join Teach for America in Indianapolis– for a man born and raised on the West Coast who spent much of his adulthood on the East Coast, the Midwest was just as much of a foreign territory as any he’d been to.

I felt like my relationship with my grandpa was cut unfairly short when he died two years ago. There is so much about his life and career and travels that I never asked him about. There is so much about my life and career and travels that I will never get to tell him about. But I know that I will always have him to thank for who I am today– I am a person who says yes to adventure, even when it’s hard. I am a person who is open to new experiences and new cultures. I am a person that my grandfather would be proud of.

I’m going to be honest– teaching was the part of my Fulbright experience that I gave the least thought to. The logistics of travel, securing a visa, and finding housing… the thrill and fear of being in a foreign country… the anxiety and uncertainty about making friends and building a social life… all of these took precedence in my mind over the day-to-day experience of teaching. Now, with my first week of work under my belt, I’m getting a better sense of what my Fulbright ETA experience will be like.

First Day(s) of School!!

I was surprised by the nerves that crept up on me the night before my first day. After an unsatisfying night’s sleep, I woke up on Tuesday morning, donned my confidence-boosting green dress (pic below lol), and made my way to the school. Between my anxiety and the steep walk up a hill, I arrived at school drenched in sweat, which didn’t help me feel calmer AT ALL. I had very little communication with the school over the summer, so I wasn’t sure where to go or who to talk to first. Eventually, I found my way to the front office (which wasn’t really at the front of the school #confusing) and met the directora, vice directora, and secretary.

After meeting a lot of new people in a short amount of time without being sure what their roles were, I met the English teacher who I will spend most of my time collaborating with. Her name is Mar and she has been so helpful to me this week as I get settled in! From what I can tell, the school has a handful of full-time English teachers (I think it’s 3 or 4) who float between the grades. They teach English as a foreign language, but they are also implementing a program where they teach certain subjects in both English and Spanish to promote bilingualism. This year, they are teaching science, art, and physical education as bilingual subjects to certain grades. Since the English teachers did not have a set schedule yet this week, we were mostly helping out in the Infantil 3 classroom– preschool children aged 3 or turning 3 by December 31.

Beautiful Chaos

Returning to the familiar chaos of a preschool classroom as an assistant rather than a lead allowed me to view the classroom dynamics with fresh eyes. First of all, it was a relief to see that three-year-olds are universally crazy no matter where you go. Unlike the school I worked at in Indianapolis, the infantil classes here are divided by age– there are two 3’s classes, two 4’s, and two 5’s. I always thought that having mixed age groups was an odd choice, since five-year-olds are so much more advanced than three-year-olds, but I can now see that having a classroom with 20 three-year-olds has its own drawbacks. Almost all of them are away from their homes and their families for the first time, so almost all of them cry at some point during the day. There’s also more potty-training setbacks than I typically saw in my classroom back in Indianapolis, since the kids are newer to the using-the-potty-game.

I was surprised and excited by the diversity at my school. I would estimate that less than half of the children I saw in the infantil classroom spoke Spanish at home. The rest of the kids came from Morrocco, India, Bangladesh, China, the Phillippines, Germany, Scotland, England, and more! This diversity creates some challenges, especially in the three-year-old classrooms where the students haven’t been exposed to any type of school routines before. The teachers only speak Spanish and some English, I only speak English and some Spanish, and the kids are left in the dark a lot of the time because many of them don’t understand the instructions we’re giving them. It’s also hard to understand them when they get upset or ask for things, just like it’s hard for them to understand us when we try to comfort them. In our Fulbright teaching orientation we were told that we might see some ~teaching practices~ that we wouldn’t approve of in the US, and I’ve definitely seen teachers resort to yelling at kids who don’t understand or losing their patience with kids who cry. Unfortunately, saying something louder in an unfamiliar language doesn’t make it easier for the kids to understand. I empathize with the teachers’ frustrations because I felt the same way in my old classroom for a variety of reasons. Since it’s not my classroom and it’s not my culture, my approach has been to try to be as calm and friendly as possible with the students. I speak slowly and use a lot of gestures and smiles so that they can start to feel comfortable with me and with being in a school setting.

Even with students who are native Spanish speakers, I am only allowed to speak English at school. This seems to be the rule across the board for English assistant-teaching programs like mine. I once took a class on bilingual education, and I need to dig up some of those old readings about the pros and cons of this approach. So far it has been difficult because I’ve only been with very young children who are only just beginning to understand that different languages exist anyways. I also got to observe the two first grade classrooms where I will be working, and the teacher told me I don’t have to pretend not to understand the kids, but I have to respond to them in English. Starting next week I should have more of a schedule and will be leading lessons in the infantil and first grade classes. I had asked about working with a variety of age groups, but the early grades are where they are beginning to implement the bilingual curriculum, so that is where they needed me most.

By the end of the week, I was surprised by how tired I was for only having worked half days. I was ready to spend the weekend relaxing and exploring the city that I will be calling home as soon as my lease starts in October!

Arrecife

Outside of school, I’m still in a state of limbo because I don’t move into my apartment until October 1. My AirBnB host in Puerto del Carmen has been wonderful, but I’m excited to move to Arrecife and really start building a community there. I’ve been into town a few times to explore, and so far I’ve been happy with what I saw. The teachers at my school were surprised that I had decided to live in Arrecife, since it will be a bit of a commute by bus (or guagua, as they call it here). As the capital city, Arrecife is the biggest population center on the island with around 50,000 people. It is much more of an authentic living experience than Puerto del Carmen because it is less of a tourist destination. While it is a little less charming than the tourist-y towns nearby, it is also less kitschy and less overrun by sunburned Irish people (not throwing shade, since I basically am also a sunburned Irish person). I think that living in Arrecife will be a better home-base for building a social life and having easy access to stores, restaurants, and buses.