Expense Reducers

So this is a short one, but I was pretty proud of it when it happened. I went to get my hairs cut (yes, all of them) in preparation for a job fair today and couldn't find anywhere local, so I went to Cost Cutters in Dillon, CO. Monica got her hair cut before me and as we were waiting we noticed that they had tanning booths available. They offered unlimited tans for 120 bucks a year, which seemed pretty cheap to us. Not like I'm one to roast my pasty ass in an oversized microwave, but that sounds like a deal.

Anyway, Monica finished with her haircut and came to sit with me while I waited for mine. She said that she asked her stylist about the tanning beds and had been informed that they were soon to be removed. When my turn came to get sheered I asked the woman cutting my hair why they were getting rid of their tanning beds. She wasn't sure, so I suggested that maybe it was to cut costs.... Right over her head. She honestly did not get it. "Yeah," she said, "they are pretty expensive to maintain."

If I ever work a job that's so mind numbing that I miss a soft-pitch pun like that, fire me.

Trying Something New

As an unemployed writer, I have to do whatever I can to make a little bread. I just started writing for Hubpages so check out this link and maybe click on an ad or two. I might make a few pennies.

The Best Microbrews in Colorado

The Show Must Go On

Well, I know it's been a bit since I've posted an update, but I now have the inspiration to continue posting, so hopefully someone out there is still reading this. I've returned to the states and am fervidly hunting for a job. Any job will do. By the way, anyone know of any openings?

Since the title of this blog is essentially "tomorrow," I thought it might be interesting to analyze the American can-do attitude from the point of view of the maybe-next-Thursday lifestyle I just left. This is no longer an expat blog. It's now a repat blog.

So far I've scheduled two interviews. The first of which was at the ambiguously named company, American Income, which I discovered to be some sort of sleazy, pension robbing life insurance company after looking into them. I didn't even bother to go to that interview. The second was with a company called Max Marketing. I should have been tipped off when I couldn't find a website for them. And the name should have been a dead giveaway. Try googling max marketing.... Did you try it? You'll notice that there are over six and a half million hits. If you actually bother to click on any of the results each link seems to be dodgier than the next. None of them were the company that I interviewed with. No website at all. Sketchy, right?

So I made it past the first interview. So what? There were three hoops to jump through for these assholes and I couldn't even bring myself to leap through the second. At the first interview, the receptionist greeted me with a glazed, automaton look in her eyes. As I waited, I sat reading a three-month-old copy of Vanity Fair while listening to her rattle off the same scripted phone call that I had received six times in a row. Word for word, it was exactly the same every... single... time. When I asked her about her day it was like talking to an answering service. "If you would like to know how my day is going, press one, para español pulsa numero dos." The boss of the company was even more robotic. As I stand here looking down the barrel of something approaching a career, that is the type of person I fear becoming. The Borg. I asked the boss of the office three different times, in three different ways, where he was from, and the only response I got was, "Nine months ago I was sitting exactly where you were," as if that actually explained his origins. He could have said, "my mother" or "San Diego" but it was the same thing every time. Nine months ago he came from where I was sitting. Great.

Trying to be optimistic about the fact that I was asked back to the second round of interviews in such a tough job market, I jumped on the opportunity to come back for the eight hour interview the next day (which was earlier today). I was told that I would shadow one of the "account managers" to get the gist of the job.

As I write this (and this isn't to brag so much as embarrass myself) I'm wearing a sixty dollar tie, a hundred dollar shirt, a hundred and fifty dollar pair of pants, and a hundred and fifty dollar pair of shoes, most of which I received as gifts for graduating college. I felt slick at the start of the day, and now I just feel like an overdressed douche bag. This is why: the opportunity to work for a marketing firm in a fast paced environment that they had offered me was, in fact, hocking coupons for pizza to unwilling passersby. "Anyone in earshot," as they put it. I'm in my best outfit slinging pizza. Motherfucking pizza.

It gets even better. Where do we go to bother people about buying shit they don't want? Their places of employ. And, incredibly, to all the employees of Max Marketing this sounded like a good idea.  Even better than that, the first building that we hit was a medical center. We were selling pizza at an outpatient rehab clinic. The first poor victim of the saleswoman I was shadowing was a diabetic woman in a wheelchair. She was trying to sell pizza to a diabetic. Just wait, there's more. Every day there is a second product that they sell just in case they can't sell the first. Today it was paintball. I shit you not: She was trying to sell pizza and paintball to a disabled diabetic.

After that I thought that things could only get better. Oh, no, they got worse. There was a group of groundskeepers outside the building trimming some trees. My trainer approached one of them and launched into her pitch. He rolled his eyes and with no Spanish accent at all said "no English." Clearly he spoke English and just didn't want to deal with her crappy pizza pitch. Was she deterred? Hell no. She simply pointed to the coupons and said "ten pizzas" demonstrating the number by waving one hand twice, and then "eleven money." Please, he's Latino, not mentally challenged. So we had already crossed the border into veiled racism and it was about 10:30 in the morning. I felt compelled to sheepishly mutter "lo siento."

I believe there to be two distinct types of embarrassment. The first is the type that you feel when you come to class naked, the second is the type that you feel while watching any film staring Ben Stiller. I experienced both simultaneously today. I was embarrassed to be seen with her and embarrassed for her. She had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about walking into a business with "no soliciting" clearly marked on the door and then soliciting. Even when it was the door to a biker bar called Prickly Pete's and her mark was the heavily tattooed, three hundred and fifty pound Prickly Pete himself. The door said "Solicitors will be flogged." He was shaking his head "no" as she pitched her pitch and I was standing right behind her trying to silently mouth "please don't flog me Mr. Prickly, I have nothing to do with this lady!"

Then it came time to break for lunch, thank god. She launched into some interview style questions as we walked, ostensibly part of the second interview. What are the three things that I think make me a good employee? My response was my punctuality, my personable nature, and my honesty, and then I told her "to be honest, this all sounds like a steaming pile of bullshit." As if to confirm what I had just said, she explained that it wasn't, because for every $11 book of pizza coupons you sell, you get four dollars, the boss robot of the office gets four dollars, and three goes to printing the advertising. In turn boss robot sends some of the money to his boss robot, who kicks money further up the line to the king robot. She explained that it was like a pyramid. I asked if she thought it might be a pyramid scheme, and she said she didn't know what that was. Welcome to American economics.

While she was trying to sell the pizza coupons to the bankers at a supermarket bank branch I just walked away. I feel truly sorry for the two dozen chumps being pimped out by Max Marketing Denver.

They told me "we try to keep a positive attitude," but this about sums up my attitude at the end of the day.

In conclusion, I am still jobless, but I still have my dignity, and if nothing else, I'm a little wiser. After all, who offers a management marketing position to a guy with a creative writing degree and nothing but teaching and newspaper experience? Ultimately I can only laugh at myself.

A Spaniard By Any Other Name

One of my favorite parts of Spanish culture is the unique names. Perhaps not unique in their content so much as the combination of different common components at tortuous length. I offer as a prime example the name of the plaza that I look out over from my apartment window: Plaza de Santa Maria Soledad Torres Acosta. Given, the title of "plaza" and the namesakes saintliness inflate the length a little, but I have had students with names almost as long, such as Jose Miguel Ignacio de la Torre Reyes (altered slightly to protect the innocent). Imagine having to sign that on all your important documents. A couple of my business students have even truncated their names to make it easier for English speaking foreigners to remember.

As for myself, I have taken to christening my students with nicknames to make it easier to remember them and easier to discuss them with other teachers. I have to add the disclaimer that I don't do this to be disrespectful... I love my students. I usually pick their favorite word in English as the basis for the moniker and then that becomes their alias. My first example is a student that was much more intelligent than he initially portrayed himself to be. At first I thought that he was a very low level beginner because he had trouble understanding even the most basic questions.

Me: What is this? [speaking very slowly, pointing to a television]
Jorge: Huh?
Me: What... is... this? [I can't speak any slower or more clearly]
Jorge: Huh?
Me: What is this? [I point to a Pokemon poster on his wall featuring some sort of reptilian creature]
Jorge: That's Charizard, he is my favorite Pokemon because he is a dragon.
end scene


So little Jorge ended up with the nickname Jorge "huh." If I wasn't talking about something he liked, he absolutely did not give a shit about what I was saying and demonstrated this by responding to anything, either question or statement, with his nickname.

I recently ended classes with a student who was quite similar. He was a twelve year old named Gustavo and his last teacher was a friend of mine from the certification course I took when I first arrived here. After my first class with this student, I was convinced that my colleague had simply sat him in front of cartoons for eight months and made no attempt whatsoever to actually teach him. To keep things regular with my students, I always ask similar questions when I first arrive in class as a warm-up. What did you do this weekend? What did you do at school? Unerringly he would answer "Play fútbol." At first I just thought that he was just a soccer aficionado, but when I came back from Christmas and changed my routine slightly I realized that he was just feeding me bullshit.

Me: Hello, Gustavo! What did you get for Christmas?
Gustavo: Uhh..... Play fútbol.
Me under my breath: son of a bitch.
end scene


Guess what Gustavo got as a nickname. The reason I ended class with him was that he was accepted into a bilingual school.

One of my best students, at least the one that has improved the most, is a man named Pedro whom I teach on his lunch break. I tell this tale because it illustrates how casually Spaniards drop obscenity into their conversation. A lot of the time it is as if they don't really understand the gravity of cursing in English. Joder (ho-DAIR) is a pretty common utterance in a conversation with a Spaniard and it is the equivalent to our "fuck." Only, it isn't quite as heavy as it is in English. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to hear a priest drop the J-bomb with the way it gets bandied about over here.

He says it about almost everything. Even the most inconsequential happenings. If our meeting room gets changed: "FUCK!" If he misses one answer on an exercise: "FUCK!" I almost want to tell him that it's a pretty heavy hitter in the world of taboo words, but it's just too funny for now. Maybe on our last day of class I'll clue him in. The other day we were discussing the media and he emitted one of my favorite quotes of all time: "TV is... TV is a FUCK!" That it is, Pedro... that it is.

Again, guess what I call him.

In the end, I think it's a good thing that Spanish people have such unique and long names. That way there is something to call out when you are looking for a blind date in a crowd like this:

Find the tall, thin, attractive one with black hair and brown eyes.

What NOT to Say

It seems to me that a common theme in travel writing and blogging is the confusion and comedy that arise when learning a new language. This week I would like to demonstrate to you how one or two misplaced or mispronounced letters can result in sidesplitting laughter on the behalf of the native speaker.

Exhibit A:

For the Spanish, English vowels are one of the hardest parts of pronunciation. We were always taught that the vowels are a, e, i, o, and u, when in reality you should double that number because of long and short vowels... and don't forget the diphthongs. In Spanish, each letter makes one sound and only one sound, so everything is written phonetically which is why the difference between bow (as in the weapon of choice for archers) and bow (a show of respect popular in eastern countries) is often lost in a heteronymous nightmare. As a teacher I hear these little mistakes on a day to day basis. Being able to suppress my laughter can be a real task when a student talks about all the "fine bitches" in the south of Spain that they lay on in the Summer or the the areas of English they would like to "fuckus" on practicing. Being immature is so much funnier when you are supposed to be acting professional. Which reminds me, if anyone reading this works for the travel company 1-800-Beaches, please do us all a favor and hire a spokesperson with a Spanish accent.

Exhibit B: 

Next I would like to present my personal experience with public mortification. In Spanish, the word for chicken is pollo (POY-oh). Easy enough to pronounce, right? Well if you switch that last "o" for an "a" it means something entirely different. I will explain via a story.

I'm making my weekly shopping rounds, picking up wares from the different markets: vegetables at the green grocers, beer at the liquor store, tofu at the Chinese market. Everything is fine until it came time to visit the butcher. Because my Spanish is still pretty poor, I have to write my script ahead of time and rehearse it in my head like a little movie as I make my way to whatever I am supposed to do. Before I go to the grocer I have to practice the interaction mentally: "I'll have a half kilo of avocados, a quarter kilo of carrots and five apples." These little scripts usually include two or three appropriate responses from the other party and then my responses to their responses. It's a very short film. Perhaps four lines worth of dialogue. If someone should deviate from this script, I'm screwed. The entire interaction gets shot to hell. They could say something as simple as "Okay, half kilo of apples, right? And how are you today?" and I get that deer in the headlights look as I have to entirely rewrite the whole movie. I'ts not like I don't know the words. I do. Only, when I have expectations about the conversation that are proven wrong I forget every shred of Spanish. So, on my way from the Chinese market to the butcher I am practicing saying "a half kilo of chicken and a quarter kilo of chorizo, please." I repeat this over and over. Of course, when I finally get there and am asked what I want I declare with much gusto, in my best Spanish: "Un medio kilo de polla" and then judiciously, "y un quarto kilo de chorizo, por favor."

Translation: "A half kilo of penis and a quarter kilo of sausage, please."

You can imagine how much the burly, old Spanish butchers in their blood spattered aprons appreciated my request, and the courteous "please" at the end.

Exhibit C:

I was not personally present for this one, but I still have to tell the story so I am not the only idiot in this post. When we first arrived in Spain, Monica decided to take a Spanish class to brush up on her skills. As an assignment they were reading Little Red Riding Hood aloud to work on pronunciation. At one point in the story, the narrator explains that Little Red Riding Hood's only friends were the birds in the woods, and the word for bird in Spanish is pajaro. The poor woman reading this particular passage made the subtle mistake of switching the second "a" for an "e." It is truly amazing how one letter can change a fairy tale. When read as pajero, the story says that Little Red's only friends were a bunch of jerk-offs in the woods.

Conclusion:

I think the only thing I can say is that if you are going to learn a language, the first lesson should be on what not to say. Lesson 1: Dirty Words.

Meet the Mole People

As an English teacher who teaches private, in-home lessons, I spend a lot of time getting from place to place. In a city the size of Madrid, the only way travel quickly without spending hours hiking between appointments or waiting on an endless number of bus transfers is to take the Metro. On any given day I spend between two and three hours underground. I'm starting to feel a little like the famous "mole people" of New York.

I do a lot of different things to try to pass the time. Sometimes I read, sometimes I listen to music, sometimes I just stare and drool. Studying Spanish is easy because I can just listen in on someones conversation. The bulk of my time is spent reading, and I typically finish two or three books a week because of my second job as a professional subway rider. Though, this is not always possible when the train gets crowded at rush hour. It can be a little awkward turning the pages when some strangers ass is acting as a paperweight.

Excuse my dorkiness for a moment: there are 294 Metro stations in the city of Madrid, 284 kilometers of tracks, last year people made 649,977,853 trips (nearly 2 million each day). If your average rider is underground for only 20 minutes, a conservative estimate, about 36 million minutes of human life are spent underground... every... single... day. By comparison, a person who lives to age seventy five has lived for a little over 39 million minutes. Hundreds of lifetimes are spent underground each year. We are the mole people, the Morlocks, "terrifying monsters from a lost age!" It's a little scary to think about.

Needless to say I also waste some metro time thinking about random statistics.

The point I'm trying to make is that a lot of life goes on in the metro, which means that the people watching is prodigious. It's one of my favorite pastimes. Beggars, thieves, drunkards, women breast feeding, Peruvian flute bands, Mickey Mouse in an Uncle Sam style American Flag suit (I shit you not). They're all there. Now I know where Goya got his inspiration for his curious and often grotesque portrayal of humanity. You name it and I've seen it on the metro.

Pickpockets are definitely something to be on the lookout for, but they usually only work later at night. They're generally easy to spot. To begin with, it's a dead giveaway when someone stands right next to you on a virtually empty train. A lot of them are addicts of one form or another and you can pick them out by their thin build and hollow eyes. The other type are those that look odd in nice clothing, or a little overdressed. (although, I suppose I look a little odd and uncomfortable in nice clothing when I'm going to teach a business English lesson). The overdressed thief will often drape a jacket over his arm to conceal the movement of his wandering hand. This isn't meant as a warning against riding the metro. Unless you are in the category of drunkards, or just congenitally unaware of your surroundings, you should be safe.

Another group to watch are the elderly women. In the late spring when most people have already stashed away their winter coats, you can still observe loads of old women in fur coats and scarves riding the metro no matter how hot it is. It could be seventy or eighty degrees and I could be dripping sweat like a broken faucet but the wizened old lady next to me will be drawing her seal skin a little tighter. I also enjoy watching them shoulder check a half dozen people out of the way with enough force to lay out a pro hockey player in order to get an open seat. I understand that because of their age they get tired easily, but in Spain most people will readily give up their spot to an elderly person rendering the whole aggression thing entirely superfluous. I've never seen someone hustle like an old woman for a metro seat. Here's the best part: those same women that go through all that effort to sit down will almost always stand up and push their way to a spot in front of the door two or three stops before they have to get off. Totally pointless.

With all the time I spend on it, I've gotten pretty close to the metro and even... grown to love it. No matter where I have to go the metro is there for me, magically whisking me away in its characteristic armpit stench to another far-flung part of the city. If nothing else, at least the trip will always be stimulating.

Storage Wars - A (not so) Epic Tale

As one of my favorite works of cinema of all time begins, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

And from there on out my story gets a lot less epic, though, still entertaining.

About 5 months ago as we were preparing to go back to the states for the summer, we realized that we needed a place to stash our copious amounts of books, clothes and electronics that we had accumulated over the course of the year. Thankfully our good friend Michelle and her roommates had decided that they were going to keep their apartment, and she volunteered her room for a summer storage space. And of course, as soon as the four people using the room were thousands of miles away, things began to go awry.

Michelle's roommates, who had the lease to the apartment, decided that they weren't going to stay in that apartment after all. After about a week of being back in the states we received an e-mail alerting us that all our stuff was is "storage," but we had no idea where the storage unit was, nor had we any idea how much of a shit show it would be retrieving it.

When we cam back to Spain in the middle of September, one of our first priorities was to find the storage unit. We had our winter clothing there, our laptops and adapters, our teaching material... basically everything that we would need to get back into the swing of things. And not to mention, finding our possessions was just one task on top of finding an apartment, which in Madrid in September can be like entering the Thunder Dome with Master Blaster (two tenants enter, one tenant leave).

We were naive enough to think that we could just waltz into the storage place and pick everything up, but that would have been too easy. To begin with, we needed an appointment because everything was in one of those portable storage units that the company brings to your door and then takes back to the warehouse. The woman we made an appointment with acted like no one had ever done that and that she was really going out of her way. After that we needed a letter from Nicole (Michelle's former roommate), who had the storage unit in her name, granting us permission to rifle through all her crap and dig ours out of the pile. It never really seemed to sink in for Nicole how much valuable and important stuff was in storage. She had all her important things at hand, so why should she care?

After the fist three weeks we had managed to put those two things together. By this point we had made a little game out of the situation which came to be known as "Guess where all my shit is?" Whenever the four of us were talking about things that we really needed, inevitably the previously mentioned question would arise to which there was only one answer. The situation was getting more desperate as both Michelle and our other friend Kristen were preparing for a trip to Oslo. Needless to say they needed their warm clothing. We googled the location of the storage unit and it said it was quite a way out of Madrid, but we could take the metro to get there. So we called to make an appointment for a Friday when we could all make the trek. That is when we learned that the storage unit had not been payed for in the month of October, and if it wasn't payed for the unit would probably have its contents auctioned off. After a lot of bad noise, Nicole was forced to pay the rent.

The next weekend, we made another appointment for Friday. And of course, another bump in the road. Not only was the warehouse outside Madrid, it was half way to Toledo, about 40 minutes by car. What we saw on google was only the company headquarters.

Take three, and this time we had a reservation for a car. We got up at six in the morning and took the metro all the way out to the airport, found the car rental place, and then realized that they only rent manual cars... and none of us could drive manual. Of the four of us, only Kristen is skilled with a manual transmission and she was at work. We called everyone we knew that might be able to help us out, but waking up at 8 AM to a telephone call asking you to drive to another state isn't exactly a tempting offer. We considered hiring one of the prostitutes that hangs out in our plaza, but I could only imagine how that conversation would have gone: "Uhh, excuse me, ma'am, do you know how to drive a stick shift... no, not like that, I mean a car... no, no sex involved, we just really want our stuff back."

Monica stuffed into the back of the rental car

Finally we decided to give up and try to take a train to the town and just carry back what we could. As soon as we got back to the apartment to regroup and buy train tickets, Kristen called us and said that she could leave work to drive... so back out to the airport, a forty minute metro ride. And from there on out everything seemed to finally go well. After all we had been through I thought that we would probably get there only to find out that a piece of flaming space debris had fallen out of the sky and destroyed our storage unit, and our storage unit alone, but we hardly even got lost on our way out there. When we finished rooting through all the boxes and found our things we crammed it all into the little Volkswagen Touran, with only inches to spare, and drove back to Madrid, finally victorious in the storage wars.