Life as a Language Assistant before discovering my destination

At the moment I am finding the experience a little bit stressful, in that I still don’t know the exact location of my school. I have been told not to worry until 22nd July, at which point I should contact the British Council to chase up the Ministry of Education in Spain. Nevertheless, like most people I’m sure, I have taken it upon myself to worry before the last minute – I’m not sure about others, but I love the planning part of a trip (“organised fun”, like Monica from Friends, as my former housemates would put it…), like finding the house, finding out what there is to do in the area, all that sort of thing. However that is obviously not possible – if I sort out a house in Granada, and I turn out to be working on the other side of Andalucía it will be a bitch of a commute. My Uni gave me the advice that I turn up a few days before my start date, and stay in a hostel in the relevant town and try to find a house from there. Hell to the no. Like I would EVER do that! I am definitely not one of those people who can wing it when I’m going to be in a place for a full academic year! Doing a little city break or something for a weekend, will happily traipse around looking for the cheapest place to stay.

The thing is, because I am going to be working in a school, with children (or at least I would assume that I will be) it’s not going to be the easiest thing for me to make friends at work (!) – I don’t think its ok to ask 7-year olds what they’re doing after class. So I do want to take the time to go and find a cool place to live, hopefully with students so I can hang out with some locals my age and maybe make some friends in the process.

This might be just me though… I think as soon as I hear the town/city I’m in, I will be ordering a copy of the relevant Lonely Planet guidebook on Amazon and contacting my Spanish contingents for advice and tips. I know. Ridiculously lame. But with any luck I will be too excited to care!

I plan on writing weekly pieces about how the whole thing goes once I get to Spain, and as and when whilst in the UK as the whole thing progresses, hopefully to be of some help to those in the process of applying or thinking of applying. If you want to catch up with my story so far and see more details of the application process as I did it, visit my blog.