First Week of School!

The school I work at in La Gangosa

Today is Friday which means it is officially the end of my first work week!  My technical job title in English is "Language and Culture Assistant." This means that my job is to assist English teachers in the classroom.  I am working at a town that is about a 30 minute bus ride from where I live.  The town's name is La Gangosa and has the population of about 9,000 people.  I work in a small elementary school there and I assist three English teachers!  I have 6 class between 1st and 3rd grade (2 in each grade).  The teachers were extremely nice and welcoming the whole week as well as the students!  Although they can't speak much English, they are always eagerly saying "HELLO TEACHER HELLO!"  So far this week I just kind of helped around the classroom, helped clarify pronunciation and talked with the students.  I couldn't be happier with my school placement; even though its 30 minutes away, I am actually really enjoying using the bus!  The bus ride is beautiful and it gives me some time to pop in my iPod and relax a bit.

snapshot from my bus ride to La Gangosa

The big event of the week was the language and culture assistants meeting this past wednesday.  All of the other people doing this program met up for a general meeting.  This gave me an opportunity to meet some fellow English speakers and make new friends!  There are about 75 of us in the state of Almería, so that includes about a 2 hours radius of where I am.  After the meeting, I ended up getting tapas with a group of people mostly from the UK (including scotland, northern ireland, whales and england) and there was one fellow american.  They all seem like nice people, so I'm looking forward to seeing them again soon.

I visited Almería's most famous cathdral this week!

My goal this next week is to finally set up my TIE (Spanish identity card), which is going to be a big task!  Wish me luck :)