La Fira Mediterrània

This weekend I went to the "Fira Mediterrània", a festival held in the nearby city of Manresa (the capital of the comarca - basically a county - where I am living) which consisted of music, dance and theatre from all across the Mediterranean. It was a great experience, and I got to watch and listen to some really good artists.

Although the events didn't start until 11am, I was in Manresa by about 9.20am due to the rather poor provision of public transport here on the weekends. Whereas during the week buses run between Artés and Manresa every half an hour or so until quite late, on Saturday this is reduced to a mere three buses going each way over the entire day! So my choices were either to arrive early or to arrive half way through all the events. Despite being on the verge of changing my mind when it was time to get up I dragged myself to the bus stop to get there before the start.

To be fair it was worth it. The main street of the city was lined with various stalls, ranging from local arts and crafts to various foodstuffs, and once things got going there were lots of people about, which combined with the several musical acts that played in the streets made for a great atmosphere.

I started the day off by going to a concert by "Grollers de Sa Factoria", a group from the Balearic Islands who played a mixture of funk, rock and folk music, followed by another group from the Balearic Islands called "Xaloc Música", who played a more traditional-sounding set. After these two concerts I strolled around the city listening to the aforementioned bands playing in various plazas, including a brass band listed as being from "Occitania" and another group comprised of musicians from France and the Maghreb. In a small plaza slightly out of the centre there was a concert which was described in the programme as "improvised song", which turned out to be five Catalans sitting around a table on a stage playing simple music and making up pretty nonsensical lyrics as they went.

As I was watching this (and considering whether or not I should queue for the free paella that was being offered) it began to rain heavily. This was probably only the third time it has rained since I arrived, so I can't really complain, but since it was on a day when I was outside and enjoying a festival it was a bit of a pain! I left the concert and found a sheltered place to have some lunch until the rain stopped.

The afternoon events started with a performance by "PerkImBa", a group of mainly young people whose name comes from the mixture of the words "Percussion", "Improvisation" and "Ballet". The name pretty much explains it all - the show consisted of an elaborate dance involving the use of drums and a few other instruments. I wasn't expecting much (I went as it was the only event on at the time), but it was actually a mesmerising and impressive performance. By the end there was a large crowd of spectators, and the applause lasted for a fair while.

After this I went to a really good concert called "Mar Mur", which was put on by a group of musicians from Italy and the Paisos Catalans. It had a unifying theme of immigration and the exchange of cultures across the Mediterranean, and lyrics in both Catalan and Occitan. I finished the day off with a concert by a Valencian singer who goes by the stage name of "Botifarra", and who is supposedly very well known here. It was another good concert, even if I couldn't understand the stories and jokes he was telling between songs (apart from the one joke he decided to tell in Spanish instead of Catalan). I returned today for a couple of hours with the family I'm living with to watch a couple more concerts by two Catalan folk groups, "21 BOuTONS" and "Randalleries".

It was all good fun, and very interesting to see different artists from the various cultures that surround the Mediterranean.

Incidentally, for those of you who have expressed jealousy at one point or another at the fact I am in a warm country, you can stop now. Winter has arrived in Catalonia, and it feels bloody freezing. Some areas have even had snow.

Oysters! (The Problem With Online Translators)

When I was in secondary school the language teachers always warned us about the general unreliability of online translators, and the fact that it was usually immediately obvious if one had been used.

They can be of use if you are translating a word or relatively simple phrases, but anything more complicated and it all tends to go wrong. Although some are better than others, all online translators struggle to deal with complex sentence structures and have little ability to take context into account, which is absolutely crucial if you are looking for an accurate translation. They also tend to have problems with colloquial language and sayings.

A group of my students who are taking a special module about cinema had been tasked with writing a script for a movie, which I was given today to look over and correct mistakes in the English (the language the module is taught in). It quickly became apparent that they had written it in Catalan, and then pasted it into an online translator. I could just about make out the general plot (a sordid affair involving drugs and prostitution), but large parts of the script were completely unintelligible.

My favourite parts were:

"She goes to scroll her body to the disco sweet." (When I read this I burst out laughing.)

"Oysters! If in nothing do I have between the legs...Matches you shit it, where I have the head? Has gone for me of a hair!" (Impossible to understand, but it sounds almost like the kind of language you'd find in a Shakespeare play!)

The phrase "Oysters!" confused me particularly. I asked one of the English teachers, and it is a direct translation of "ostres", which is both the Catalan word for oysters but also an exclamation that roughly translates as "damn".

Why the word for oysters is used as an exclamation, I have no idea...

VIDEOS: "Castells" (Girona)

I've now uploaded the videos I took in Girona of the "castellers". Enjoy!

Swine Flu Strikes?

It appears that the school where I am working may have been struck by an outbreak of swine flu (or "gripe A" as it is known here).

It's not entirely clear that it IS swine flu that has caused a large number of teachers and students to call in ill over the past week, but given the frequent and slightly apocalyptic reporting on the illness by the media (which is just as bad here as in the UK) that is the first conclusion pretty much everyone has jumped to. Although it could well be right!

Either way, yesterday there was a particularly large amount of staff and students off sick. One of the classes I had in the afternoon normally consists of twenty-seven students, of which I usually teach half each week. Yesterday, however, I ended up taking all of the class. Or at least the seven of them that weren't off sick...

I should point out that this class was an exceptional case and that most classes were nowhere near as badly depleted as this one!

(If you are wondering about the picture, then it happens to be the first thing that came up on Google Image search for "swine flu"!)

Girona

This weekend I decided to go to Girona, which is only a couple of hours or so away from where I am by coach. Girona is a fantastic little city, with a history that stretches back to when Rome controlled the Iberian peninsula. Sadly there is very little to be seen from the periods of Roman or Moorish rule, but there is a lot of very impressive Romanesque and Gothic architecture. More modern, but still very nice, are the painted houses that can be seen along the river that runs through the heart of the city.



I arrived slightly later than I had intended, since I missed the first bus to Girona and had to wait another two hours for the next one. Nor was this the first piece of back luck I've had with buses - the weekend before I went to Barcelona for the day on Saturday and managed to miss the last bus back! But I arrived in Girona eventually...only to spend the best part of an hour looking for my hostel. The directions on the website had been very vague, but to fair it has to be said that a large part of the problem was my own lack of observational skills, since I walked right past the hostel at least three times before finding it, and even looked straight through the window (I saw people sitting at tables and assumed it was a café).

Once I was finally all sorted with the hostel, I headed out into the city to explore. Girona is a very nice city to wander around, with lots of interesting architecture and a generally pleasant atmosphere. The cathedral is particularly impressive (with what is supposedly one of the largest naves in the world), as is the Benedictine church of Sant Pere de Galligants, a fine Romanesque structure that now houses the archaeological museum.

The weekend I was in Girona was the start of "Les Fires de Girona", a week-long festival for the patron saint of the city, Saint Narcissus. It started with a short sermon given from the balcony of the town hall, which was followed by a fairly strange performance by two men on a trampoline set to the tune of "Daddy Cool" by Boney M. I can't say I really understood the point of it all, but it was quite entertaining anyway!

The next day, after a night of sleep that was disturbed several times by rowdy French schoolchildren who were staying in the hostel, I continued exploring the city. I also met up with a friend for a tour of the city and some lunch, which was good. In the evening I headed out to see more of the festivities. My first stop was at a small plaza to see two groups of "castellers". "Castell" is the Catalan for "castle", and the peformances involved the construction of a human tower that looked something like this. The outer ring of people then climbed down layer by layer, leaving a central pillar with each person standing on the shoulders of the person beneath them. It's really quite impressive, and I will try and upload one of the videos I took of them soon.

After this I headed to the Parc de la Devesa, which is the largest park in the city. For the festival it had been converted into a large carnival ground, with a great range of stalls offering all sorts of food/drink and games and also plenty of rides and other attractions. There were loads of people and a great atmosphere, and if I had been able to it would have been nice to be able to stay for the whole week and enjoy all of the various activities and entertainment on offer.



On the night I was at the park there happened to be a free concert by a group called "Els Pets", who are very well known in Catalonia. Their name translates as "The Farts". In a way the name is quite fitting for one of the most successful Catalan bands, since the Catalans have some fairly interesting cultural quirks based around a similar sort of thing...but I will go into that nearer to Christmas time! The concert was good fun, and by the time it was finished it was well past midnight. It was early by Spanish standards, but since I needed to catch a train at 8.30am the next morning I headed back to the hostel to get some sleep. Alas, the hostel was inhabited by more noisy people, but I guess that's what you get when you pay for a cheap bed in a hostel dorm (only €15 a night, with breakfast included)!

Girona was well worth a visit. In fact, I would have to say that it is my favourite place in Catalunya after Barcelona. Having said that, there are still plenty of places in Catalunya for me to visit, so who knows? It will be pretty hard to beat, however.

American / English?

Although there are language assistants in Spain that have come from places such as America and Australia, UK English is the version of the language that is taught in Spanish schools. Of course, from my point of view that is a good thing as I don't have to worry about inadvertently teaching my students something that might be deemed "incorrect" by an exam board.

However, despite UK English being used as the standard in schools, there are occasional signs of US English creeping in. This is probably inevitable given the global importance of America and its unparalleled ability to project itself culturally across the world, but it is nonetheless irksome.

The two most obvious "Americanisms" that keep cropping up are the use of the term "high school" and the pronunciation of the word "tomato".

Partly, of course, this is down to the teachers. Indeed, I've heard some of the English teachers here saying both of these things. But it is also partly down to the widespread presence of American cultural products. The use of "high school" instead of "secondary school" (despite the Catalan equivalent - "escola d'educació secundària" - being closer to the UK English term) is quite probably reinforced by the great popularity here of the "High School Musical" films. As students are naturally more likely to be influenced by their favourite films, books, music, etc than by me telling them something in a classroom, I suspect that it would be very hard to get them to use the term "secondary school" instead. And if this is what their teachers are telling them as well, it is probably best not to give them a different version and cause confusion. So I think I will largely let that one pass.

With the pronunciation of "tomato", however, I am determined to have my way and encourage students to use the common British pronunciation of "tom-ah-toe" instead of "tom-ay-toe". Today I ended up standing at the front of one of my classes and getting students to repeat it until I was satisfied. ("It's pronounced 'tom-ah-toe'. 'Tom-aaaah-toe'.") They probably thought I was quite strange.

These things are not "mistakes" as such. And even within the UK there are variations, making the concept of encouraging a "correct" version of something a bit dubious. So perhaps I shouldn't be doing so at all. On the other hand, since the syllabus is in UK English I feel I have some justification for correcting Americanisms!

What I found more surprising was the apparent blurring of the distinction between British and American culture. More than once in my classes I've heard both Madonna and Hannah Montana described as being English. They are, of course, both American.

Given that American culture is dominant globally, it struck me as a bit odd that some students are assuming that American cultural icons are British rather than the other way around. Perhaps it is something to do with the geographical proximity of Britain? I honestly couldn't say.

Education in Catalonia

When I was still in the UK I asked my tutor at the school here in Catalonia whether there was a dress code for teachers. I was aware that school children in Spain don't wear any uniform, but I thought that perhaps staff were expected to dress a bit more formally.

When my tutor, Alba, replied to my email she told me that I could "dress the way you like as long as you are dressed!".

I'm mentioning this because the first thing I noticed when I arrived at the school on the first day was has informally dressed everyone was. I was half-expecting it, but still opted for a smart shirt and smart brown shoes to avoid dressing too casually. I really needn't have bothered. It's quite common for teachers to be walking around in jeans, t-shirts and trainers, just like the students.

That's just the most immediately apparent of the ways in which the atmosphere in schools here is a lot more informal than that in their British counterparts. Students don't call teachers "Sir", but use first names instead (whereas I was calling teachers "Sir" or "Miss" until the start of Sixth Form).

I'm not generally a big fan of overly formal situations, so I'm finding the more relaxed and informal way of doing things very positive. It's especially interesting in the light of Michael Gove, Tory education spokesperson in the UK, opening his speech at the recent Conservative party conference with a discussion of the need for more discipline in the classroom and the importance of a smart school uniform. From what I've seen here the lack of such formality does not seem to have any clearly adverse effect on teaching, although perhaps the schoolchildren here are a bit rowdier and it can take a long time to get them settled down. On the other hand I have no doubt that it is the same (if not worse) in some British schools.

There are, of course, plenty of other differences. The first class starts at 8.30am (groan) and the last finishes at 5.30pm, making for a much longer school day. However, on Friday school finishes early. Students doing the Batxillerat (equivalent of AS/A-levels) study a minimum of eight subjects, as opposed to the three or four that a British college student will usually do.

A distinct feature of Catalan (as opposed to Spanish) education is, of course the use of Catalan. Castilian is taught in Catalan schools as a second language, and nearly all of the classes and administration are conducted in Catalan. In fact, there was recently a story in the news here over the ongoing controversy over whether Catalan schools should have to provide two hours of tuition per week in Castilian or whether this should be increased to three hours, as the central government in Madrid has been trying to impose. Given that Castilian is the main language of the country, it is striking that the amount of time being talked about is so small.

From what I've seen I have to say I like the education system here. I'm happy not to have to dress up smartly to go to work, and the atmosphere is friendly and relaxed.

And of course there is the wine at lunch time...