Coffee con leche

I wrote this a couple of days ago, as a northern man on the table adjacent asked for a "coffee con leche" which made me chuckle. 

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I tried to get up early this morning to get a Carnet Joven (youth discount card) from the local bank. It turns out that you need a cita previa (prior appointment) and can only go before 11 if you don't. This is a classic Spanish bureacratic occurrence and I don't know why I didn't forsee it. With work starting at 12 I'll have to leave it until next Tuesday (my only free morning). I now have time to kill before 12, so I take a seat at the bakery/cafe along the promenade and get a coffee. This life is easy and stupidly luxurious in a lot of ways. I get to live by the beach, drink leisurely coffees and work part-time. 

Without complaining, it is also difficult. Talking to another language assistant friend the other day, we both discussed the lack of community we have felt since moving abroad. Being alone has become my default setting, which I enjoy a lot of the time. I feel more free than I did in Bristol, but I miss the normalities of life sometimes. I miss going to the pub with my friends. I miss making pasta bake and watching Strictly Come Dancing with my flatmates. I miss having big crackly garden fires whose smokey fumes infuse my clothes for days to come. I miss putting the Backstreet Boys on at the launderette where I used to work, jiggling away whilst folding sheets in the backroom.

I know I need to put myself in this reality. And I am. I am following the advice that we were told as wee second years about to embark on a year abroad. Live with native speakers to improve your language. Say yes to every opportunity. Reach out to people around you. And all these things are paying off. Compared to the other moves abroad this one has felt smoother, despite the hiccups and anxiety that I've experienced so far.

But I do still miss home, and I don't want to lie about that. I miss knowing that I am a part of something, that I immediately have a closer link to all the strangers around me, simply because we share a native language. Speaking in a second or third language, you are a few steps removed from the comfort and normality of your native tongue (or the one that you are most used to communicating in). I know my privilege in this situation, that I chose to be here. That I have always sought out different languages and cultures. That they have never been forced on me like they are on others. But whilst there is beauty in this immersion, there is still a loneliness in it which you have to get used to.

There are lots of ups and downs in this experience. Yesterday I was dancing to the Beatles with my first years whilst today a kid in P.E told me he didn't like me. It's hard not to take children's words to heart sometimes but I have to keep reminding myself that they are basically tiny innocent drunk people whose brains don't function in the same way as an adult's. It is refreshing to see how happy they are made by such simple things and I wonder at what point they lose that sense of freedom. I get why teachers say that the profession keeps you young. Although this certainly isn't true for all teachers (in fact, the reverse seems to be more apparent with some), I never imagined myself dancing to "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" with a bunch of Spanish 6 year-olds. It has brought out a side of myself that I thought was dead and buried approx 15 years ago, but I'm glad that this tiny drunk me has been dredged up from the depths of my childhood.