Tarragona by the Sea

Last week was a busy week. I began going to Catalan classes on Monday and Wednesday nights, and to Castellano classes on Tuesday and Thursday nights. In addition to school with the children and the adult ESL classes I teach, I'm out straight! The Castellano classes are really basic, but I go because it is a rare opportunity to hear someone speak Spanish, even if he is talking about how to give directions and tell time and describe what we're wearing. It's no Don Quijote class, but it is all I've got right now, so I'll take it. The Catalan class is a different, more challenging, story. I've been hearing Catalan now for four months and had begun to pick out and understand some words and phrases, but the structure of the language was still a mystery to me. After only three nights of class, I feel like what I've been hearing for the past four months is taking on a more recognizable form. Poc a poc, as they say. Some of it is very similar to Castellano, but it also resembles French and even Italian. I'm certain to begin to confuse the two.

School continues to go well, and I feel like I'm making some progress with the children. The 6th graders are working on writing an essay right now that they will have to memorize and then I will record them reciting it. Last week I began taking small groups of three or four students to a separate classroom to work with them on their grammar and pronunciation. I really enjoy working with them alone and being "in charge" instead of in Rosa's shadow in class, not really able to do much. This past Friday I had to go to Barcelona for the final training session of the program. It was a two hour workshop with about twenty other Auxiliares where we discussed different strategies for how to animate our students to learn and practice English. It was useful. Kristian came with me to Barcelona so after the meeting we spent the day wandering around. Barcelona is lovely. We went up and down the Passeig de Gracia and on and around Las Ramblas, searching in vain for food that we can't get in Solsona. We thought we might have more luck finding international foods in a city, but only managed to find one thing on our list, which was some jelly made with just fruit juice, no sugar.

On Saturday we went on yet another excursion organized by Rosa. This one turned out to be the best one by far. We went to Tarragona for the day. Tarragona is about an hour south of Barcelona, on the Mediterranean. It was originally settled by the Romans and it has some very well preserved ruins from the 2nd or 3rd century AD. There is an ancient amphitheater sitting just at the edge of the sea, an Roman circo where the gladiators fought, and a lovely walkway with Romanic pillars. The gothic cathedral is also something to see, built much later obviously. The temperature was about 10 degrees warmer than it has been in Solsona, which was wonderful but hard to come back to the chilly north after such a summer-like day. To the west of the sea, inland, the mountains rise up outside of the city, so Tarragona sits truly amidst the best of both worlds. We were smitten and started making plans for how we could live there next year. (!) Here are some pictures of our day.