Spain is my Valentine: San Valentín, Fallas Intro, and Maribeeeeeeelllll.

Día de San Valentín

I will do Valentine's day a thousand times in Spain if I never have to do another one in a U.S. school. We celebrated the day at school and the kids were excited, but it was not the overwhelming, exhausting charade I have experienced thus far in my teaching career. First of all, Spain in general is lacking the crazy commercialized hype of the holiday out in the community (and this is true for other holidays as well.) I had almost forgotten Valentine's day was approaching because you just don't see the ridiculous explosion of Valentine crap in stores like you do back home. There was no Valentine party involving truck loads of sweets, soda, or sugar coated sweets. Spanish parents don't really get into all that...not for holidays or birthdays. The teacher simply gave the kids fun little Valentine worksheets and let them write Valentine's to each other all day. We also watched the Charlie Brown Valentine's cartoon, and the students were plenty excited for all of this. Since there's not a bunch of stuff in the stores, students don't come with pre-made valentine's for each other because they can't buy them. They just made valentine's from construction paper and then delivered them to each other in these little "mail boxes" we'd made. You can see my mailbox below.


The one drawback of this is that a small number of students didn't get very many valentine's.

Here are a few of my favorite valentine's I got.




But let's get real... here's my true valentine. Café con leche, I love you.
This is the one that comes out of the school machines...it comes out of the machine with the little stirrer and everything.

Happy San Valentín Day to me.





FALLAS

In exactly one month, Valencia is going to lose its mind. The week of March 12th is when a festival called Fallas begins. I am still coming to know and really understand what Fallas is all about. I figured I would ease you into it and introduce it now, but rest assured that there will be mucho más Fallas on the blog as we get closer to March. So hold all questions until later. Fallas, in a nutshell, is a week long festival but people have been preparing for it for...a while. In each plaza in the city's center (I'm thinking there are ~80) there will be a Falla. As best as I can explain, a Falla is a constructed statue of ...something... a character, person...and possibly other things. The Fallas are set up all week, lots of festivities happen EVERYWHERE in the city's center (aka where I live), and at the end of the week, they burn them all down. All but one (according to a vote which has already happened). The voting happens at this exhibition, which several students went to last week. On display are smaller pieces of the Fallas that will appear in a few weeks (I think this is correct but I'm not sure...I wasn't able to go to the museum). Anyway, just so you get an idea, here are some pictures another girl took while there.





If you are confused, no worries. I felt like I understood it in my head, but now that I'm trying to explain it I feel like I know very little.

At my school, we do a mini-Fallas. So each class is making a falla centered around a theme. The theme this year is Wonders of the World and our class is doing New York City.
Here are some photos of the beginning structures:


Angéla and the Chrysler Building

I will keep you posted on how the rest of this insane celebration plays out.

Food picture alert:
School lunch for the teachers. Both of those plates at the bottom are mine. And the freshly squeezed orange juice in the white cup...something I am not going to be able to go without from now on.






Maribeeeeeellllllll


Vicente (my bus driver) and Maribel (bus monitor)


These guys are great. But if I hear Maribeeeeeelllll one more time I will scream. And I will hear it one more time. I'll hear it 1,000 more times. Every day going to and from school I hear children wail out the bus monitor's name. I don't know why. Most of the time they don't actually need help. Maybe they just have a question. But they have mastered the art of whining out her name so that it carries across the bus and right to my last nerve of the day. I would guess a minimum of 10 times do I hear Maribeeeelllll during each bus ride. I don't know how she doesn't slap them.
Between this and other opportunities to hear Spanish children, I have determined that the Spanish language is much more conducive to whining than English. Maybe because the words have a lot more vowels to draw out. Maybe it's just because I just haven't been around whiney English children in a while. But I'm pretty sure this theory is ready to transition into a law. If you wanna whine, you will be way more effective in Spanish.