We Speak Camino

The language of the Camino is Spanish. It may seem odd that to me this is odd, but it is strange to me. So much of the world functions in English, and so many of my travels have been dominated by English that this Spanish-language environment has been a surprise.

Also shocking has been the number of Italians we have met here and their willingness to teach us Italian.

Our Spanish (and our Italian) has grown by leaps and bounds. Here is a Camino primer.

1.) Hay visto cane.

We see Paquito (from Italy) every day on the Camino and love to tell others that we saw him (in Italian of course).

2.) Hay visto farfalle. Hay visto cavallo. Hay visto Tian. We can see lots of stuff in Italian and then talk about it. It’s a handy construction. Highly recommend. 

3.) Ampolla

Blister. Also pronounced “bluster” if you are from Barcelona. Ampolla was one of our first Camino words because one of us developed a healthy family of blisters very rapidly within a couple of days on the Camino. Yup. Gross. 

4.) Vale (pronounced “vah-lay”)

Life is totally vale (okay) when you sit down every night to a glass (or bottle) of wine and a three course meal. Things don’t get much more vale than that really. 

5.) Sello

These are the sellos that we have to collect a couple times each day to prove that we are pilgrims and have walked the entire way. Being able to remember the word sello has proven challenging so sello is a word that you should start working on now. You know, for when you do YOUR Camino. 

Buen Camino.

Becoming Pilgrims

Something happened around day five on the Camino. Barely a third of the way through our 300km plus journey and we became pilgrims. I can’t find the tipping point in my memory—it just happened.

Mostly we stopped seeing the Camino as a hike and started to see the journey as a reminder of the importance of accepting life as it comes. Here is some wisdom the Camino has imparted in the last week:

1.) Follow the signs, even if you are not sure where they will take you. 

2.) Walk higher than you thought possible yesterday. 

3.) Meet lots of people, and always be nice to them (also, everyone loves a selfie—even dairy farmers in the middle of nowhere). 

4.) Even when things are dreary, keep going. 

5.) Share with people you don’t know...and people you do know. 

6.) Eat it, even if it looks yucky, because it probably is amazing. 

I suspect we knew all these things already and could have gone manny places in the world to be reminded of these lessons, but the Camino has special powers to make pilgrims. 

And so we continue. 

Buen Camino. 

Coffee Life on the Camino

I used to hate coffee. The beverage and I just were not friends. And then one day, I am not sure what happened, but we came to terms with one another and our love affair has evolved here on the Camino.

To be a pilgrim, you must drink lots of coffee. And you must drink it in little cups.

With steamed milk. Lots of steamed milk.

And sometimes you should drink it in paper cups. 

I think not participating in the coffee thing might disqualify a person from pilgrim hood because everyone rasps poetic about coffee and the places on the Camino where you can find coffee, which seems to be about every three miles. 

Coffee stop. Gracias a dios. 

Coffee helps make this a buen camino. 

Ma Lord, It's Madrid! (sorry, that's kind of a dad joke)

Oh my goodness are we just a couple of cornballs on this walk or what?

The further we walk the cheesier we get and, as we have not yet really begun to walk, things will likely only get more desperate in the coming days. 

We started this journey in Madrid after a surprisingly smooth flight across the Atlantic. Our seat neighbor was a Spanish teacher. She taught us a lot of useful Spanish, including, “I would like to check in to my room early” which we didn’t end up needing because we got lost on our way to the hostel. More on that later. 

See why we got lost? Not a worry, though! Tian has taken five years of Spanish! Bueno, right? No. The struggle was real in Madrid for the first three tourists who walked up to her asking for advice and for our initial forays into asking for directions ourselves. 

We finally figured out our little barrio in Madrid but Tian never figured out why everyone thought she knew what she could explain where they should go. She doesn’t look terribly Spanish but all the Spanish-speaking tourists thought she did so Tian was bombarded with requests for information. And her Spanish improved with each awkward exchange!

Maybe it’s the black t-shirt?

We walked out of the hostel this morning at 5:30 to catch the 7:00 am train and found the streets FULL of partiers. It was pretty exciting stuff what with the couples doing the unspeakable in dark crevices, puddles of vomit, and the squares full of singing and dancing in the predawn hours. No one asked for directions and no one stopped us even once as we dashed through the streets. 

And now we are in Oviedo, on the pilgrimage route, preparing for 16 miles tomorrow. 

Wishing us a Buen Camino during which so many people ask Tian for directions. It’s good for the Spanish!

Food Porn

Dear Children Three,

No doubt you are at this very point in time enjoying the heat of PA while we are here enjoying the heat of the Gulf. And, in addition, we get beach sand and city dust, desert stones, a rainbow of smells, wadi cats and dogs, endless construction, humidity, ocean views, and lots and lots of white buildings. Not sure who has the better deal here, although I have my suspicions.

Oh and in the dorm where we are staying there is this periodic wailing noise that sounds like a teenaged girl has been cemented into the wall and regularly reminds us of her presence. I know, weird, right?

Aside from enjoying the outdoor charm and wondering about the screaming teen in the wall, we have been eating. A lot. At this rate, they will have to roll us off of the plane when we arrive home in a couple of weeks. Start reinforcing the second floor because nothing threatens structural integrity like a couple of summer-in-the-Gulf bellies.

Quite likely you three are sitting there salivating, dreading what I may post next. Buckle in because we have had three days of some serious yummy stuff. As a matter of fact, Wednesday was so decadent that we didn’t feel the need to eat on Thursday until 5 p.m.

 

Yes, yes. Uncharacteristic.

This may have been part of the problem--too much posh cheese and beverage. We picked the label out special for Silas.

 

Mangoes and charoot grown on a friend's farm here

Here we go… more select shots of food porn.

From the new bakery in town



Fresh fruit--or at least as fresh as you can do when most of the fruit is imported. This showed up when one of the teachers complained about, eh-hem, regularity

Living the dream, Silas--two kinds of rice twice a day

You all probably remember these two things--laban, which they serve in the cafeteria as a lunch time beverage--a little bit like salted buttermilk crossed with yogurt, remember? And below, Daddy's chocolate decadence cake, which he made for a brunch we went to--you would have been bored to tears with the six hours of talk about educational research. Aren't you glad you're in PA?

 

 

 

 

 

Love,

Yo Mama

 

 

 

 

100 Uses for an Exercise Band and Other Teacher Things

There is something absolutely delicious about an assignment that takes the task of thinking away from the teacher and hands it to the students.


It leaves time for dressing up in exercise bands and colanders, and for taking ussies with your collaborative, in-classroom, teaching partner.


We finally have our students in class and have been tasked with teaching them the fine art of communication with a dab (yes, Silas, I said dab) of critical thinking thrown in. My goal--make them work harder than I do while we are in the classroom.


By throwing a mix of items onto a table and asking the students to come up with 100 uses for those items in 10 minutes, at that moment, the students were thinking way harder than I was and thus working harder than I was, too.

A small success.


The students were no longer sitting down.

As a matter of fact, they were jumping up to hustle around their tables to stand next to one another, looking over one another's shoulders and talking to one another.

Group secretary

For those of you who have lived and/or taught here, you know that this kind of genuine communication between boys and girls is exciting when it happens as it seldom happens outside of families.

Wire hanger uses...

And to be frank, the students were not just talking--they were shouting at one another. They were beginning to network and to learn to learn from one another instead of just from me and my trusty colleague (the one with the colander hat).

Considering 100 uses for paper cups.

Okay, the students were not quiet. But quiet is boring. And while I am at it, textbooks, classes driven entirely by teacher lectures, and set syllabi are boring. Really super-duper boring.

There. I have said it. May the teaching deities strike me down.

This looks like success!

On On, On Up, On Down, Down Down



 

 

A visit to Muscat would not be complete without a Hash.

 

 

But what is the Hash, you ask? Oh ye who have not read every single one of my posts (if you had, you would have read about it six years ago or so), exclusively for your benefit, I have found this--a video from the USA that explains a Hash better than I ever could without losing your attention. A word for warning for those with delicate ears--there are some naughty words bandied about in the video. If they make your skin crawl, stop right here because it just gets worse at the Hash.

Check out that flour...totally on trail I am.

And Hux? Also owning the trail. Well done, Hang Tang!

Something we noticed on this trip is that we require two hands and a foot to count all of the Hash sites that have disappeared since we left Muscat two years ago. With the rapid pace of development and the constantly expanding infrastructure improvement projects, finding a place to lay a Hash seems to be getting downright difficult. Although a Hash can be run in the middle of a city, this group prefers to be out in the middle of nowhere, for obvious reasons. A few standby sites still exist, though, with this site being one of them.

At the end of the run, if you're super lucky (and we were this week), there is food and refreshment and the promise of another Hash the next week.

ON ON!