Au Pair Experience: Double Trouble!

Hi hi hi hi hi guys!

Ladies receive roses and gentlemen receive 

books on San Jordi. Picture from J. Á. M., El País Catalunya,

¿Dónde firma mi autor favorito el Día de Sant Jordi?, 21/04/2012, http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2012/04/
19/catalunya/1334866129_718542.html,accessed 6/03/2016

So this is your proper fun update because everything I´m going to talk about is good, except the fact that I´m leaving in a few days! However, I´m set to return before San Jordi. It´s a very big tradition in Cataluyna and as much as it pains me to say that I´d rather spend Saint George´s day in Cataluyna than England, it´s true. In England you just see English flags waving about and yobs shouting at PoC to go back to where they came from, because apparently it offends us to see the English flag. It´s a mess. Rather get some roses and a book! 

Life has included a lot of food (and beer) lately which has been delicious but I just about fit into any of the less loose clothes I have, so I may start having to skip the flan (so sad, so sad). So, last Friday night we had pintxos, like I´d had with my family in Barcelona, and they were seriously good. The restaurant was cute too with a really friendly waiter (who knew the family well) and a cool mosaic of Balaguer going across the whole wall. I stared at it for so long because it´s so detailed.

The next time I went I wasn´t so transfixed by what I saw, so I took a selfie with the two out of three friends I have here and tried not be disappointed that the fried fish tasted like...fried death.

Last week when I suggested to these two that we go to the
exact same restaurant I´d been to the night before, because the 
food was luuuush and then it turned out not to be quite as good

In addition to great food, there´s also an awesome new au pair in town! (We´ll call her NAP until she agrees that this post isn´t too embarrassing and is ready to declare her name to the world). She´s all the way from Australia and didn´t grow up in the Bush as far as I´m aware, but a farm, so she fits right in here! 

Anyway, she´s great, really bubbly and amazing with the kids, with a lot of good ideas about how to keep them occupied. Also braver than me because 

she´s only studied Spanish for one year. So all week 

we´ve been hanging out and I introduced her to the people I know here, including Irish Girl who is suuuuper funny.  I´ve shown her around town and we did a bit of the tourist thing, hence the picture on the left. On our afternoon off, we went to Lleida, the nearest city, and had a laugh there getting lost and treating ourselves to cute clothes that we weren´t sure that we needed. She´s living out of backpack and went for really specific things, ended up with about half of them, whereas I went for basically nothing and got some new boots and other things I´m just not going to talk about. The frozen yoghurt we shared was toootally worth it though, Oreo pieces, dulce de leche and strawberry omg, I´m gonna have to go again before I leave.

On Wednesday we had basketball together which was as knackering as it was fun and maybe a little embarrassing, judging by the fact that Carme saw my face while I was throwing the ball and is gonna tell the coach not to push me so hard, and the fact I didn´t get up until 12:15 on Thursday afternoon. Many baskets were missed and Carme translated everything for us English speakers (myself, Irish Girl and now NAP), which we really needed! If she´s not there one day then we´re gonna be screwed. I understand bits, sure, but I still end up the one confused about how much running we actually have to do and who to pass the ball to.

On Thursday I had a Spanish test at my school and I may or may not share the result, depending on how awful it is.

Skip to Friday night where we had a whole ton of fun and way too much pizza. Like I´ve said before, our host families are pratcially clones of each other so when the ten of us went out for dinner, we all paired up and chatted with our doppleganger, but there was a distinctly relaxed and excited family atmosphere and we all shared laughs and conversation. Everything about it was really lovely.

The restaurant itself was super cute with shelves of random things and a lot more space than I expected. From the outside it looks like a small shopfront but inside it´s Narnia.



Eventually it got pretty late and I politely asked Carme if we could leave because we´d planned to have a drink with our friends. It was no problem at all and as much as we wanted to go, we would´ve been fine spending the rest of the evenings with our host families, communicating in 3 languages (with an Italian menu), although I tried to stop the kids from teaching her things in Catalan instead of Spanish. It was so funny, the kids got a bit interested with my hair so with a few plaits as a moustache, I transformed into Antonio who works on a farm and has 13 girlfriends, including both the girls and the host mums. God, it was such a mess but it was so fun, a great end to a good week.

I´m sure while were having a drink NAP said something about how she loves me and how happy she was to have met me because I´m amazing which was so lovely of her! Haha, it was more like we both have amazing families and everything has just been incredible so far, and as negative as I can be sometimes, it´s true.

Picture by Carme, prize for best pose goes to Roger!

Until next time,
Antonia xx