Doing as the tourists do

I’ve now been in Bilbao for 4 weeks and I can finally say that I’ve seen the landmark the city is most famous for – the Guggenheim museum. The museum celebrated its 15 year anniversary this weekend so entry was free and the first 3000 visitors each day got free cupcakes. Unfortunately going to bed at 4am meant we missed out on the cupcakes, but we still queued for 15 minutes in the rain exhausted and hungover which I think was quite an achievement. And, honestly, I was a bit disappointed with the museum.

The Guggenheim is an incredible building, and you can’t miss it when you walk the streets of Bilbao so I guess I was expecting something slightly more amazing. The actual structure of the building inside is still incredible but the exhibits, in my opinion, were pretty forgettable. I’m probably not the best judge because I don’t really appreciate art in general, but I was happy that I didn't pay 8€ to walk around what, at times, I thought resembled an IKEA warehouse. 

The teaching side of things in Bilbao has been going ok. At first I loved talking to the kids’ one on one because it’s easy and I love talking, but there’s only so many times you can pretend to be interested in someones favourite music. So I’ve asked if I could start taking some whole class lessons instead, and next week I will be teaching the students about Halloween. I never thought I’d see the day when I actually want to take on more work. I did have one mishap, however, last week that still hasn’t deterred me involving the teacher asking me to explain the meaning of words like ash, flood, and volcanic eruption which is quite difficult for someone who never paid attention in GCSE science lessons; so I stumbled my way through giving explanations such as "ash is what you get in a fire". She then asked me to write on the whiteboard words to do with the topic natural disasters and had to correct at least 5 of my spellings (in my defence they were words like lightning and tsunami). When a native Spanish speaker corrects your English spelling I think it’s a sign that you’ve officially been studying foreign languages for too long.