School trip to the farm school !

As a reward for my hard work and commitment, I was given the opportunity to go on the Yr1 Primary school trip to La Salle in El Escorial. The duration of the trip was two nights and three days - what a nice break from work! My students are only 6-7 years old and they're already going on overnight trips... brave children!

Wednesday, 27th April. 
The day began as usual at 9:15am. The teachers and students waited outside infant school for the school bus and for everyone to arrive. We departed shortly after 9:45am and headed off to the farm school. The journey was very short; maybe 20 minutes away from the school. We drove higher and higher towards the mountains and the views were beautiful... everything looked so peaceful - a complete contrast to the Madrid city life!

Upon arrival, we were greeted by the monitors of the resort who introduced themselves to the children and took them off our hands. They were led to their dormitories, where the boys lived in one room and the girls in the one next door. At this time, we were also given a tour to our accommodation. We stayed in the main building just 2 minutes away from the kids'. Here, I shared a room with my two teachers in a large 3 single bed room. We had our own bathroom just opposite our room.

Because it was the first day, we didn't really do much. We had breakfast shortly after we arrived and settled in and then we walked around the resort to see what the kids were up to. The food service was great! We had so much to eat during breakfast, lunch and dinner. I guess it was a nice change from the food that I have at the school canteen ^^'. The kids were doing activities with the mentors and we relaxed.

After lunch, Mako and I went to visit the Royal Palace in El Escorial. We went for a tour inside it which was very interesting - lots of tourists. The weather wasn't great, it was cold and windy... but nevertheless, we still had a good time. After the tour, we walked to the pretty streets of the town to find a café for a drink (tea of course). It was really nice to relax with my teacher and to discuss other things other than our students or work!

Time flew by very quickly so we headed back to the farm school by taxi. We freshened up and got ready for dinner. As expected, we looked after our kids during lunch and dinner - ensuring they were eating their food and checking up on them. We always had our food after the kids had theirs... so once they were all finished and moved onto their next activity, we had our food.

By 10pm, the children were very tired. Many of them wanted to sleep and some wanted to carry on doing activities! ^^' they slept in bunk beds in one room. It was really cute because they all wanted a kiss before going to bed and they asked if I could sleep on the spare bed in their dorm!! After putting the kids to sleep, we went back to our room to get some kip.

Thursday, 28th April.
I was woken up fairly early because of the animals just outside of our window (roosters, donkey, parrots). After getting ready, we went downstairs to assist the kids during breakfast. Again, they had a day full of fun activities - the best thing was not having to look after them! After breakfast, we joined them on their little adventure walk. It was nice to walk into the countryside but it wasn't nice for my nose/throat! I have really bad hay fever so I was suffering a little bit but it was totally worth it :) the kids were doing activities that involved the 5 senses which was pretty suitable. When the kids went back to the farm school for lunch, Mako and I continued walking and went on a small hike. We walked through the countryside and saw some pretty beautiful views - well worth it again. It wasn't long until we turned around and went back for lunch :)

The rest of the day consisted in a lot of relaxing and lounging around. The internet/wifi was terrible so we couldn't do any work or surf the net. We had the opportunity to check the animals out; we saw peacocks, talking parrots, rabbits, ducks, pigs and more. We laughed so much when the parrot was talking to us and it actually started laughing as well...actual laughing. Sonia, Mako and I were laughing so much and I had tears coming out of my eyes!! ^^'

After dinner, the kids had a disco as it was their last night. We had dinner and had an hour to kill (well at least we thought we did) until the disco. We assumed the disco was at 10pm so we headed down at 10pm, only to find that the disco had finished and another school was having theirs! Turns out, our disco got pushed early because there were two schools to fit into one night. What a shame! We tucked the kids into bed again and went to sleep.

Friday, 29th April. 
Our last day! The day started off pretty cold and gloomy but eventually it warmed up and the sun came out to play. The kids finished their final activities where they made nature books by collecting leaves etc to put in them. Time flew by (doing nothing) and next thing we knew, it was time to go home! We left the resort at around 3:45pm and got back to school in no time where we waited for the parents to pick up the kids. By this time, the weather was beautiful and it was pretty hot.

Thank you. 
I'd like to thank SEK, my boss, my co-ordinators and my teachers for gifting me such a great 'prize'. It was such a nice getaway and I feel a lot closer to my teachers after spending a three days with them. I will continue to work hard for the remaining month and a half left of placement and I'm very thankful for everything they have done for me.

Hard work definitely pays off, guys! So don't ever slack!

- Tiffany

Long Weekend To B a r c e l o n a !

Good afternoon, readers! Before I begin this blogpost, I just want to give you a heads up that this post will be longer than normal as it will be a documentation of my 4 day trip to Barcelona during my long weekend last weekend! I'll try my best to keep it as short as I can but if you get bored along the way, feel free to just have a look at the many pictures I took :)

Long story short; Esther's sister, brother in law and cousin booked a holiday to Barcelona for the beginning of November which fell on the same weekend we had a long weekend so we decided to join them for a few days. We're always up for getting out of Madrid and exploring new areas of Spain and Barcelona was one of the top places we wanted to visit for definite - now ticked off out list!

Friday, 06th November 2015
We left for Barcelona on Friday 6th November after work to catch the Renfe train at 5pm. The train journey was 2.5 hours long (not too bad) and I have to comment on the train itself. It was definitely the nicest train I have ever been on - this is not an exaggeration! There were leather seats with foot rests and you could also move the seat back like you can on an aeroplane. The seats were spacious and there was even a small tv at the front for people to watch. Pretty fancy hey! Unfortunately, I can't back my words up with any picture evidence ^^'

After what felt like a 'short-ish' journey, we arrived in Barcelona around 19:30pm and took the metro to the apartment we were staying in (all 6 of us). The metro station looked very old and run-down compared to Madrid! It took us no longer than 15 minutes to get to the station where our apartment was and there we waited for Esther's family members to come and get us. After being picked up, we walked to the apartment to drop off our bags and to quickly freshen up before we headed out for dinner. The apartment was very cute...consisting of two bedrooms, a living room, bathroom and a kitchen. It was actually my very first time staying in an apartment before - it reminded me a lot of Hong Kong! Small and compact space. After a quick freshen up, we all walked around the area in search for a restaurant to have dinner at. We ended up in a typical Spanish restaurant that offered standard dishes such as Tapas. Dinner was nice but we were just so tired so after dinner that we walked home and had an 'early' night. I couldn't sleep until around 3am the first night because I felt very uncomfortable and for some reason struggled to catch some z's. And to top it off, the neighbours were blasting music in the morning as early as 8:30am! That was definitely a successful wake-up call...

Saturday, 07th November 2015
Rise and shine! After a rubbish night's sleep we started the day early to go and get some nice grub! We walked to a breakfast place called Picnic which was about 15 minutes walk away - a nice morning/noon stroll. We ordered eggs Benedict and pancakes which were delicious! Perfect way to start the day :) it was lovely to sit outside and have breakfast with the morning fresh air accompanied with a nice hot cup of water. I hope to find a breakfast place like this here in Madrid!

After breakfast, we walked to the infamous Parc de la Ciutadella where the sun began to shine and brightened up our morning. The park is very pretty like Retiro Park in Madrid. We walked through the park where people were riding bikes, doing yoga and we eventually reached the fountain! I really love parks and nature surrounded areas...so this was a pretty special sight for me. 

Introducing; Florence (Esther's cousin), Jess (Esther's big sister), Carl (Esther's brother in law)

When and if I visit Barcelona again, I will definitely spend more time exploring the entire park! I reckon it would be beautiful during summer. After visiting the park, we walked to Las Ramblas which is basically a long strip of little market stalls with quite a few restaurants around it. 

Whilst walking through Las Ramblas, we made our way to the market. The market was huge; offering lots of different kinds of food from fruit&veg to freshly cooked seafood to different types of hams. It was very very busy and I noticed there were many American and British tourists there. Never have I heard so many people speaking English yet so far in Spain! ^__^' the market is great for people who really enjoy their seafood! They also had fresh fruit juice which I really really wanted to have (similar to ones in Hong Kong) but unfortunately, I still had quite a bad cough so I chose to be sensible enough to not trigger it with a mouth-watering watermelon juice! 

Following the market, we went to check out the Marina which was just round the corner (everything was within walking distance, so good!) It was strange to see the weather so smoggy... we actually couldn't see much in the distance - it was that bad. Nevertheless, the Marina was beautiful as expected. There were lots of boats parked up and the pier was pretty cool too. 

We took some time to appreciate the cool surroundings for a while and then decided to find a nearby café to sit and chill in. By this time, everyone was quite tired and just wanted to relax. Again, we walked back up towards Las Ramblas and managed to find a very cute/cool café on the corner that seemed appealing. The decor was lovely and they even had English Breakfast Tea! ^^ It was possibly one of the nicest café's I've ever been to. It was really nice to just sit and talk whilst sipping on a delicious cup of tea - I would definitely go back there :) The staff were friendly and there was even a little shop downstairs that sold merchandise such as cocoa etc. The stairwells were ever so pretty! 

Relaxing made everyone sleepy...^^' so we chose to head back to our apartment to have a rest/siesta! To be honest, I think it did us good...a bit of time to rest and to catch up on a bit of sleep before we headed out for dinner. So in Barcelona, I think it's quite popular to have 'stick' food for dinner... which is basically tapas on a stick (i think)! Since there were so many food on a stick restaurants literally just around the corner from our apartment, we decided to enter one! These 'restaurants' are very small and cramped with little spaces to sit. They have a bar full of different types of food on a stick and the majority of them are just 1 euro each unless specified differently. The most you had to pay was 1 euro 80, I think! It was a cool thing to try :) and I'd definitely do it again. Unfortunately, I don't have any images to show you what it looked like! We managed to finish dinner fairly quickly and the night was still early so we went to a bar for some drinks. The bar was a little on the mature side so we went to another one near our apartment that was a lot more lively and sold more drinks that were to our taste. It was a very funny night consisting of lots of cocktails! ^___^ it was nice to sit and drink with good company. I finally tried Sangria! which to me, was not the greatest drink. The taste was too similar to red wine... I can't remember what time we arrived home but I know it was a late night! ^^' 

Sunday, 08th November 2015

After a night of drinking, we woke up late (oops) and went straight for brunch at a nearby modern café that offered perky dishes - stuff like bagels and fancy toasts. 

Flo, Samra, Esther and I went our separate ways to Jess and Carl as we wanted to different things. We went to visit Camp Nou (Barcelona's football stadium) which was only about 15-20 minutes from where we were. It was so so cool seeing the stadium with my own eyes and not just on tv! There was a match on later that evening so the stadium was very busy...full of tourists and football hooligans. It would have been amazing to watch a football match but sadly we weren't able to get hold of tickets and it we weren't in Barcelona long enough to waste half a day on football ^^'. The big official store was amazing... football shirts with a name on the back were 100 euros and plain shirts were 80 euros. 

The weather was superb, really hot! It would've been bad for us to not visit the beach! And everyone knows that I love beaches... it didn't take us long to head back to the pier and from there we walked towards the beach. It felt like we were walking for ages and the beach was nowhere to be seen ^^'. Along the way were people selling cheap/fake goods...just like they do in Madrid. By the time we reached the beach, it was getting quite chilly and the sun was beginning to set. It was still a beautiful view but I could imagine it to be even more beautiful during the summer...

It was really lovely to walk along the beach during the sunset as you can see in the pictures, the sky was beautiful. I will most definitely come back to Barcelona when the weather is hotter to embrace this beach! I actually think it was nicer than Valencia's... :O 

For dinner, we chose to go to a Chinese seafood buffet that was supposedly really good...and a place to try out whilst there. I haven't had Chinese food in two and a half months so this made me slightly happy. There were tons of different seafoods, sushi, rice...ah. The first few bites felt like home! I also had some snails too... xP the night ended with some ice cream from a nearby shop near our apartment and we decided to have a early night in preparation for our last day (sob). 

Monday, 9th November 2015

Our last day in Barcelona... T__T we wanted to be as productive as possible during our last few hours left in Barca so we took the metro to where Segrada Familia was. I don't really know the history behind this building but you can Google it if you want to know more about it. It was quite breath-taking to be honest... there wasn't much to do there, but look at it. We wanted to go inside, but the tickets were all sold out. 

After taking several photos of Segrada Familia, we had some lunch in the park next door to it which was nice. A warm picnic in November... strange eh? Only in Spain! There were lots of souvenir shops around the area which I was able to barter with the owners to buy what I needed! The salesman was very annoying - kept following me round the shop and telling me to buy this and that. But now I know that as soon as you head for the door, they will chase after you and give you as much discount as you want! A great tip for bartering abroad! ^^ 

Our next destination was Montjuïc. We walked up many hills to get to the top of the hill that greeted with an amazing view of Barcelona - made the walk so much more worth it! There was quite a bit to see at Montjuïc...but our main purpose was to see the 'magical' fountain... to which we found was not even working that day! Massive fail... but the museum behind the fountain made up for it :) we didn't enter the museum, just admired it from the outside! 

Our last hours in Barcelona were coming to an end sadly and it was time for us to head back to grab our bags and leave for the train station. But before we did that, we went back to the same café we had bagels at for some drinks. The weather was so good on our last day...and I was wearing skinny jeans >__< 

My trip to Barcelona (first time) was one to remember. I thoroughly enjoyed all four days spent there and that was all down to the great company. It was a pleasure to meet Esther's family who were very nice and welcoming. I hope they had lots of fun too! 

Barcelona has a completely different feel to Madrid...it feels more of a holiday destination whereas Madrid is just all about the city life - similar to London. I would like to visit again sometime in the future with my family or friends! 

I hope the post wasn't too long! I have already cut it down a lot shorter than I planned to make it ^^'... I decided to include more photos so hopefully it didn't bore you too much. 

Thank you for reading! ^___^ 

-Tiffany