Resi Cuatro.

About three years ago, the wonderful videogames show Consolevania* released a special episode to commemorate the release of Resident Evil 4. Now I love Consolevania, but I've never loved Resi, so I wasn't really that bothered by the special theme, and some of the jokes went over my head. It's a survival horror series, and I'm a big pissy wet blanket when it comes to horror, so I've never seen any reason to bother with the games. In fact, I played a bit of Resi 1 at my mate's house, and we just laughed at the shitty dialogue and terrible controls. Still, the review of the new game was so fantastic that I went out and bought it, played it a bit, then left it on the shelf, like a fucking fool. This year, I tried again, finished the game, and now I'm fucking hooked. It's brilliant, for many reasons all said much better in Rab's review. There is, though, one thing I've been really enjoying this week, and I'll tell you what it is - just wait a minute while I start turning the crank on a big, clunky analogy.

Sometimes, if I've really enjoyed it, I'll play a game through twice. Usually, the second play-through is almost as fun and a bit less difficult. Resi 4 takes this concept and gives it a turbo-charge. Fuck being less fun, it says, let's make it a fucking riot. See, over the course of the normal game, you have to carefully save money for better weapons, a bigger weapon case, firepower upgrades, and the like. When you finish the game and play again, you start with absolutely everything you earned the first time through. Just like that, the odds are now stacked in your favour. The enemies that seemed so resilient and scary the first time round now drop dead with one shot. Your treasure pennies can now be spent upgrading your guns to absurd power levels. The bosses who gave you all that trouble first time around succumb easily, and you can run through the game at a brisk pace, enjoying all the grand set-pieces with a fraction of the nervous tension.

And now here's that big, clunky analogy I promised: I wonder if my second year teaching will be like that second playthrough? If I do alright, and if they'll have me back, I can see myself staying at the school here for another year. I'd be starting again, but I'd have already seen the plot of the teaching year, even if I choose to play through it a little differently. I'd have a stocked arsenal of lesson plans that I can upgrade. All the bosses I fought the first time (observations, exams, parents' evenings) might succumb a little more easily. Instead of being scared by the hordes of enemies I had to face each week, I'd go into things with a little more firepower and a lot more confidence. And maybe the ever-present nerves and apprehension from the first year might give way to something approaching fun.

Of course, I should be careful with this analogy, because I'm essentially likening my students to parasite-infected monsters, and teaching them to mowing them down with a variety of high-grade weapons. It's a wanky comparison, not a literal one. That said, some of the fuckin' teenagers...


*Consolevania is a bit special: it's full of humour and love and bile and it deserves its own blog post full of praise one day. If you like videogames enough to have an opinion about them, you've got no excuse not to watch CV. It's free, for fuck's sake! If you've never seen it before, I recommend watching from Season 2 onwards, when it got good. You can download now, for free, at:
http://mirror.pixelated-ape.org/consolevania/season_2/
http://mirror.pixelated-ape.org/consolevania/season_3/
and visit
http://www.consolevania.com/
where Season 4 is in full swing, once you're up to speed.

Spanish Bureaucracy.

Apart from being a really good title for a Guns'N'Roses B-sides album, Spanish bureaucracy is a really odd phenomenon. Let me explain. Just take a moment to consider your own idea of a typical Spaniard. Whether this is from the stereotype (in which case, try not to fixate on the sombrero) or your own experience of meeting Spanish people, you'll probably agree that they're tanned, relaxed, friendly, and enjoy cold beers, tapas, and long evenings. This is, I can report, true (bar the sombreros). Shop assistants and strangers in bars have forgiven my cack-handed grasp of their language, and smiled all the way through friendly half-conversations that would never even have begun in England. The attitude is relaxed. Even when our landlord managed to lock us in the enclosed back yard of our flat, and had to climb through a window to let us back in because the door-handle was broken, he shrugged it off with a broad grin: why worry, these things happen.

This is why it's so baffling that trying to do anything remotely official in Spain is so bloody difficult. In my life I've never had to sign triple-copies of as many forms as I did when I arrived. I always thought that things being signed and approved in triplicate was just a joke that Douglas Adams made about the farcically officious Vogons in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide books. Maybe Vogón is an Andalucian village where he tried to apply for rental car insurance.

Confusingly, though, it seems to be possible to bypass this endless red tape through having "friends in high places" (there's a specific noun in Spanish for this, but my mind's all tied up learning the past tenses at the moment). An example: setting up bank accounts. Before I arrived, I naively expected I'd just need a fixed address, a little revision of the "money" section of my phrasebook, and maybe a work reference. The proper process, however, apparently entails an hour of queueing to present passports, work contracts and photos, in order to obtain some sort of tax number and an appointment to finalise things, in February. Fortunately, one of our incredibly helpful and wonderful managers at the language school had a friend at the bank who was willing to set up some accounts for us through some back-door route.

It may just be me, but I find this whole idea hilarious. Surely the stringent rules of a tightly-run bureaucracy are pointless if you can skip past them by knowing someone who knows someone, and all that. It's a bit like a king ordering his army to build a huge, impregnable castle, then letting his generals have their friends over, as long as he signs them in and tells them not to touch the gunpowder. Well, a little bit like that. Sort of.

As I've said, the manner of most Spanish people I've met is totally at odds with this anal, exacting attitude. I like to imagine a cabal of senior government bureaucrats, desperately trying to put a regimented, pedantic system into place, only to be constantly foiled by the fact that everybody hates and ignores them.

Web-Questing, Across The Universe

I'm feelin' good, folks, I'm ever so well. Firstly, thanks for your comments: I do read this thing so I've been replying, and I'll do my best to keep up with you all in this very Web 2.0 way (or are blogs old hat now? Should I be twittr-mobbing from an iPhone, or something?). Also, I just had a lesson with my Intermediate teens - the absolute Nightmare Class when I started - that absolutely flew. I don't know how much language they got from it (which is always the main aim), but in terms of their attitude and the effort they put in, it was like they'd broken through a wall. Less painful than that, obviously.

I can't really take credit for planning it, because it was a "Webquest": an IT-based lesson that we'd been through in a seminar and Jeanette had prepared for us. Fifteen minutes of online research and they were brilliant for the rest of the time, and gave me two great little presentations of holidays they'd devised. I think just being near the wi-fi'd laptops for a while got them all charged up. I've been having ideas about how I can get the Wii into a lesson as a genuine language tool, because they'd love it (half the students have one). Making Miis for the little ones to revise "I've got blue eyes", etc? The wordy bits of Twilight Princess for reading practice with the adolescents? Maybe I'll get some plans down and we'll see about the fun end-of-year lessons. Bit too soon to start rocking the boat that much, I think.

Aah, and an early finish tonight: off home for a chicken sarnie, a beer, and some time on a mind-boggling text adventure (or, to be pretentious, work of Interactive Fiction) I downloaded. I've been trying to write one again recently, but thought it might be an idea to see how the professionals do it. And by "professionals", I mean "people who write text adventures but don't seem to gain money or fame at all". It's not a genre that gets you into Heat magazine.

Spanish Television.

I'm not saying Spanish TV is shoddy, but the other day I switched on our only music channel (a subsidiary of VH1), only to see a Spanish version of the Windows Vista error window that says "VLC Media Player has encountered a problem and needs to close". It was still there two hours later, right in the middle of the screen.
This is a pretty clear example of the sheer lack of quality control over the TV in this country. Spanish TV is shite. This isn't because of my poor Spanish either, this is shite in any language. The first thing you notice is the saturation of game shows. These are either ripped off from UK and American formats and made slightly more gaudy, or are incomprehensible Spanish inventions. Today, let's look at:

Cifras Y Letras, A.K.A. Countdown

How is it possible to get Countdown wrong? Surely any adaptation of the format must work by the same simple rules, even in the absence of the dream team: the late, great Richard Whitely, the recently departed Carol Vorderman, and the lovely lexical locatrix Susie Dent in Dictionary Corner, who I'm a little bit in love with.

It turns out that it's easy to get it wrong. The host is clearly as uncool as Whiteley, and there's a maths lady, but Susie now has a grey ponytail, and is a man. Bad vibes. The scoring system is complicated and sort of unfair. They choose the "consonantes" and "vocals" alternately, turning the letters game into some kind of subtle but pointless battle. The number rounds are pre-determined, so they don't even get to choose "one from the top, and any other five". Jesus! This format was sold to Spanish television after its success in the UK, right? Which idiot said "we love the idea, and it works just fine as it is, but we'd like to screw it up a bit for the Spanish audience. Also, we'll change the iconic music for miserable Midi jazz."

Also, half of the contestants are rubbish. I don't like to boast, but sometimes I get longer Spanish words than they do, and with my poor grasp of the language, that's surely not a good sign. Maybe I should go on: "won Countdown in second language" would look pretty good on my CV.

¡Viva Recre!

The other weekend, I had one of those lovely Sundays that you always hope for during a shitty Wednesday. I woke up with a solid but not unbearable hangover from the excellent night before. Food and tea made me human, and I walked slowly into town to meet my teacher buddies at the post office, and from there towards the stadium that plays host to Recreativo de Huelva, the oldest football club in Spain, currently fighting hard to stay in the top division of La Liga.

The road to the stadium is utterly wonderful. Being busy, and lazy, I hadn't actually gone and seen the water of the estuary that Huelva stands on until that moment. It's a striking sight, industrial and beautiful, with a huge disused wooden pier stretching in a gentle arc into the middle of the river. When it crosses the road, you can look back under its straight path back into the centre, at the engineered symmetry. I remember saying at least twice how relaxed I felt.

We got tickets for the match: Valencia, my adopted Spanish team and league leaders, were visiting. We grabbed one-euro cans of beer and made sportsman's bets on half-time and full-time scores, and everyone else gave the locals little credit: 2-0 or 4-0 to Valencia, sort of thing. I stuck my neck out and said Recre would get a point, 0-0 at half-time and 1-1 by the end. Then we headed to the day's other destination, the Fiesta de Gastronomico, just under the shadow of the East stand.

We'd been to a Fiesta de Tapas a couple of weeks before. It's a funny thing to have a festival dedicated to tapas, considering there's no unifying principle behind tapa dishes other than that they're food on a small plate. Nevertheless, it had been pretty excellent, with cheap beer and a family atmosphere. The Gastronomico was much the same, except a bit up-market, in that you could buy jars and bottles and wheels of things. We spent €5 on good cheese, and washed it down with beer (cheap as ever - some things don't change). We had free samples of wine, poured in a showboating, over-the-shoulder way by a sort of alcohol matador, from a strange cup-on-rod mechanism: Chris had the stones to ask for a go at the pouring method, and commendably managed not to cover himself in wine while trying it.

Fed and watered, we went and saw the football, from high in an open stand on the South side with a fine view of the pitch. I had the same buzz waiting for the game to start that I get in Hillsborough watching Wednesday, but also none of the excited, paranoid claustrophobia: it was all much more relaxed. We were basking in the sun, with the peaks of the city visible over the opposite stand. There were Valencia fans behind us, but no trouble. A row of people wore silly paper hats and got us to take their picture. A man smoked good-smelling hash in front of us and munched on seeds. The first half kicked off, and Valencia C.F. didn't look all that: Recre were proper sticking it to them.

Obviously I couldn't understand all the chants that rolled around the stadium (mainly from the North Stand: it's always the North Stand), but I could dig the clapping. If there's one thing the Spanish can do, it's clap a good rhythm (clap near a Spanish baby in the womb and its little hands move on the ultrasound, sort of thing). Once in a while, this CLAP-clap-clap-CLAP-clap-clap would spread round the stadium, a thousand-strong waltz, musical, smarter than the blunt oys and aahs of English chants, which by the way I'm not slagging off; I think Recre could do with a bit of Over Land And Sea (and Barca!).

Half-time rolled around, and it had been a scrap with no goals, as I'd predicted. The interval had no daft games, no sponsored kids trying to score from halfway, just a break from the football. And then we were off again, and suddenly, wonderfully, we were one up. The set-up made me crazy, the Recre forwards passing sideways in the box while I crowed "FUCKING HIT IT", not caring about sounding conspicuously English. It went in, though, and all was right with the world, and once the celebrations died down, that peculiarly deep tension-of-being-ahead-when-you're-not-supposed-to (I bet the Germans have a word for it) set in. It lasted all of fifteen minutes. Valencia bundled in a scrappy shit goal, finished by David Villa: you could complain about the quality, but at this point he already had 10 goals from 9 games, and it takes a pretty immovable object to deal with that sort of unstoppable force.

That, in the end, was it. A good result for Recre, and a deserved ovation for the players. My prediction of 0-0, 1-1 was bang on, and I think I'm gonna start playing the Quiniela - Spanish pools. I've got a feel for it. All fuzzy from lunchtime beers, I walked the half-hour home slowly, and didn't do any lesson planning. A good thing too, I reckon: the next week was insane, with an 8am cover and my stress-filled observation lesson, but I got through it. It seems better, so far, to push crazily through the week, one lesson after the next, always on short-term alert, and then have two days of genuine cooling-down. We'll see if this works, or if I blow a gasket by late November.

My-my-my Beautiful Neighbourhood.

Right now, I love where I'm living. Not this flat, specifically: it's become fairly clear that while it's nice, there are reasons why the rent's cheap. As friendly as our landlord is, I don't hold out much hope that he'll fix the back door any time soon (if you go out and close it, you're trapped in the central well of a ten-story building - fine if you're Spiderman, but no good for me), or the washing machine that doesn't drain properly, or the microwave with lightning inside. No, the thing I really love is the area around the flat, just out of the centre. I'll set the scene a little.

Huelva's a small city, built on a wide river estuary on the South coast of Spain, half an hour's drive from the border with Portugal. It's big enough that my explorations didn't lead me to a sea view until a couple of weeks ago, but small enough that I always knew I could wander to the water and back in an idle hour. It's big enough to have a football team (Recreativo) in the top Spanish league, but small enough for me to compare them to Wigan. It's neither Barcelona nor Bumfuck, Andalucía, is what I'm saying.

Our flat is a ten-minute walk from the centre, which is itself oddly-shaped: there's a big cartesian block of shops, banks, clubs and other metropolitan staples surrounding my school, but sticking out north-east and uphill from there is a busy avenue of bars and restaurants called Pablo Rada. A few nights after I arrived, we sampled some excellent tapas and then went next door to a Moroccan-style bar, trendy but friendly, where I practised my faltering Spanish and enjoyed a little shisha. Our flat lies South of this pan-handle avenue, on the first floor of a tall apartment building just opposite the "Barro Ingles" - a half-mile square of vine-covered bungalows, apparently built ages ago for English mine-workers abroad (or something).

Instead of looking English, though, the Barro Ingles, and the whole surrounding area I'm living in, looks a lot like Los Angeles - or at least, how L.A. looks on the telly. Obviously, if you consider the name "Los Angeles", and the city's history (thanks Wikipedia, I never knew L.A. was once in Mexico), this might not be altogether surprising. Still, the resemblance is uncanny: I feel like I'm living in South Central, only without the stabbings (touch wood). In fact, if you've ever played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (one of the best videogames ever made), please load up your save file and have a look around Los Santos, the L.A.-inspired area of the gameworld. If I remember correctly, one of the safe-houses you can buy is in a block of terracotta villas, somewhere near the hospital. Those streets are almost identical to the Barro Ingles, right down to the sloping roofs and the compact front gardens. It's a bit unnerving to go out to the balcony for a cigarette, take in the view, and subconsciously think: I've shot a rival gang member in there, just as he was jumping over that fence.

It's a daft conceit, but let me have my fun, eh?

Hello World.

It's a good time to be alive right now, isn't it? It's like there's something in the air. After months of uncertain anticipation, it's finally happened; hope has arrived. One man, with the backing of millions, has written his name in the annals of history, and now holds the power to change the world. Yes: I've started a blog.

Oh, and some American dude won a vote. He seems pretty cool.

Anyway, here's the lowdown: In September I moved to Huelva, a small city on the South coast of Spain, to teach English in a language school for the next nine months. I started writing potential blog updates in the front room of my flat, listening to conversations from the popular local bar on the floor below, and scratching the fuck out of endless mosquito bites on my left shoulder (always the left: what's wrong with my right arm? Has it gone off?). It's taken longer than I'd hoped to get online, though, and right now I'm using the wi-fi (pronounced "whiffy" over here, to my childish amusement) in the public library. Never mind, this blog's officially on the go now, and I'll try to drop in the early updates I've saved once in a while alongside new entries.

I'll do my best to give a bit of insight on life here in Spain, without being pretentious ("one man's attempts to swim in a strange stream and cross cultural boundaries", and all that) or boring ("I had some nice tapas last night", etc.). I'll also be talking some bollocks about the books I've read, the games I've played, the TV I've been watching, but you can always skip those bits if you want.

Either way, I'll be really, genuinely happy if you take the odd few minutes a week to read it. In fact, as I'm a teacher, you can have a shiny gold star if you bookmark this blog. And if you're all computer-clever and subscribe to it (there's a little RSS thing on the left there), you can have two gold stars, and you get to go first when we play hangman at the end of the lesson.