By December the real Bilbao weather had arrived and enveloping rain had descended on the days. Each morning I walked in the dark past the hurrying people under their umbrellas down past the train station and across the river to the church to take the bus the school had organised for the teachers. The bus whisked us out of Bilbao onto the motorway. Exiting through a series of roundabouts, we trundled down winding country lanes with horses chewing grass in their paddocks, their breath billowing in the cold dawn air, and turned off down a straight, narrow road through a thicket of tall thin trunks and damp bramble.
Stepping off the bus I could dimly see the fields, covered in fog, over beyond the basketball courts. Mist swirled around the tops of the pine trees and the lights of the windows of the school glowed artificially in the morning darkness. I split from the primary teachers and walked to the secondary school building, into the brightly lit atrium and up to the English office.
By January, I was sick of my job. I started in September with a fresh optimism and positivity about establishing a routine, making some money and getting back into my natural habitat of the classroom. I was looking forward to standing at the front, clicking through slides of stimulating conversational topics and blowing appreciative minds in an authoritative, self-satisfied way.
It didn’t take long for this to collide with reality. The students see their once a fortnight oral English class as their one opportunity to goof around. When they come to me they are in no mood to be stimulated or have their minds blown. They would rather go on their iPads and gossip. So I start most classes anticipating a battle, anxious to make the work interesting for them so that they can consent to engage and I can feel like I am doing my job.
The thing is, I can’t really blame them. Despite being a developed, modern country, the teaching methods here tend towards the lecturing, shut-up-and-listen variety. The whacky oral teacher from New Zealand won’t shriek at them for minor discourtesies and is hence the soft touch. On top of this, the students are incessantly being tested and, especially in the final two years of school, most students are putting in two, three or four hours of study and homework a day. Mine being a wealthy school, many of them also have an additional afternoon or two in which they go to academies in town, usually to learn English.
This has gotten to the point that last year the Spanish Confederation of Associations of Mothers and Fathers of Students (Ceapa), which represents 12,000 parents associations, called for a month long boycott of weekend homework in protest at the workload. According to the OECD, Spanish fifteen year olds have six and a half hours of homework a week, well above the average of the 38 countries it surveyed, New Zealand included. It makes me recall the ten to fifteen minutes a day of homework I used to do as a high school student in Wanganui. If I grew up here I wouldn’t have been able to have the afternoons of watching television or riding in cars with boys that so defined my adolescent experience. It doesn’t seem as much fun to be a teenager in Spain.
According to José Luis Pazos of Ceapa, “We’ve got a system in which boys’ and girls’ free time has disappeared,” and schools have “left children in the latter stages of secondary with up to 60 hours of schoolwork a week.” He goes on, “It starts with children from the ages of three to six doing half an hour’s homework every day.” Fuck that.
I’m not the first person to observe the Bilbao has a way of grinding you down. The repetitive grey weather and the short days combined with the monotone of work and the aimlessness that had been lurking since Jake left and by Christmas I found myself in something of a rut.
So it was with a sense of weariness and relief that I finished the first term and boarded a plane to fly to Berlin to see my friend Theo. From the airport I navigated the metro and found my way to his bar. Through the windows I could see him inside in the cosy warmth, setting up for the night.
Vater bar is furnished with a motley collection of lamps and low, comfortable couches. There are nooks and crannies for intimate conversation and the walls are covered by assorted displays of kitsch. On the way to the toilet you brush past a life sized, psychedelic plastic palm tree. The workers can put on whatever music they like; the only rule is that it has to be happy.
Theo popped the top off a beer and sat me down on a couch by the bar. He told me that many Berliners, at least of his set, had skipped town to go home for Christmas. After a slow shift in which the only customers were a small clutch of Spaniards at a table at the back and an Algerian couple drinking red wine, I hauled on my backpack and we walked together back along the wet road to his house for a snug, smoky evening of reconnecting. I sat in his armchair while he played me a song he had been working on.
It was a real artist’s den. In the kitchen the cups and plates were slightly unwashed and there were bottles of half-drunk red wine with their corks jammed back into their tops. In Theo’s bedroom things were drawn on the walls and a chalkboard was mounted behind the string he had fixed as a clothesline running the length of the wall. Outside in the darkness I could see the wet leaves of a huge vine-covered tree that grew up out of the central courtyard of the apartment block.
Berlin felt very different from when I was there last summer. The trees had shed their leaves and now it got dark by half past four in the afternoon. People walked quickly along the dirty sidewalks, heads down against the cold. In resistance to this were the snug, softly lit indoor spaces of a city dedicated to consumption and enjoyment, and the comfort and familiarity of being with one of my best friends. That and the falafel kebabs across the road.
I’ve known Theo since we were both adolescents in Wanganui and our friendship has passed through many stages. At eighteen we had our first late night, heartfelt existentialist conversations when he stopped by my school in England on his way to France. Since then we have shared indignant, self-righteous phases (at least one each), long-haired phases (at least two each) and various broken hearts and existential crises.
Apart from the hours of sentimental navel-gazing, I also got to do some neat stuff. On Christmas Day, with a Mexican friend of his called Nathan, we shot a music video for a musical collaboration they are experimenting with. I went with Theo’s friend Lucie to the three day closing-for-winter party of one of the grungy nightclubs in Rummelsburg, before which it was suggested that I might borrow some clothes because I was otherwise looking a little too square to be let in but actually, on second thought, my ears were pierced so I might just pass and where, of all places, I bumped into my friend Vanessa from New Zealand on one of the dancefloors (check out the video on their website for a sense of the flavour).
At New Year’s Berlin turns into a war zone. While London and Sydney have expensive, coordinated fireworks displays, Berliners say ‘fuck it’ and drive to Poland, which is an hour away and has no restrictions on the sale of fireworks. There are huge warehouses dedicated to selling all manner of rockets and sparklers. You can get devices that look just like handguns and shoot fiery charges when you pull the trigger. People return with arsenals of colourful explosives.
On the night itself the Berlin fire department doubles it’s on duty officers and, in previous years, “injuries from the night have included mild burns as well as some amputations.” The celebration is completely uncoordinated and uncontrolled and sparks and explosions light up every street and pavement. It pleases me that in a country so famed for its rules and order there exists an island of anarchy and hazard. It’s a celebration of freedom and eccentricity. And of course everyone is profoundly, comprehensively wasted.
After two weeks I returned from Berlin, carrying a sniffle and exhausted from the late nights and hedonism of the city, to the quieter Bilbao to start back at school for the second term.
It was with dread that I began another thirteen weeks of waking up tired, battling through classes and coming home to make slow progress on my terrible Spanish, which I am embarrassed is not better. I eat an early dinner and retire to bed at nine o’clock. On Friday nights I seem incapable of denying myself a few beers because I can’t bear the thought of not giving myself a single late evening of solo indulgence in a week to watch videos on YouTube and mess around. I wake up tired on Saturday morning from my drinking, perhaps go out on Saturday night to see friends, sleep less than I should, wallow on Sunday and then go to bed to wake up tired again on Monday and repeat the cycle.
Yet, as I write this, the sky outside is blue and open and clear. The Saturday morning trains are rattling into the station. It is February and we have had a succession of sunny days and, now that the days are getting longer again, as I eat my breakfast on weekday mornings I can see the day breaking above the hills through the big living room windows. For the last three weekends I have gone walking with friends up into the green mountains with their tidy, damp trails and views of all of Bilbao, stretching along the river Nervion and out to the sea.
And I have an idea of what I want to do next that flickers hopefully in these tiresome early mornings.
Sources - The Guardian, 'Spanish parents urged to put children on weekend homework strike'
- The Independent, 'This is how Berlin celebrates New Year's Eve'
