Liceo La Paz, the kettle and a lottery ticket

My biggest achievement of the first week in A Coruña was buying a kettle! And the sun finally came out...

But first, let me tell you something about my school, Liceo la Paz. It's really impressive in so many ways, with 2,000 students from 3-18, a professional training school and a language college. It's also a plurilingual school, which means that the children have lessons in three languages from the infants onwards: Spanish, Galician and English. This results in many of the students reaching B2 in English by the time they're 13 or 14 (the level you need for many English-speaking universities), and some being advanced (C1 or C2) in English by the time they're 16 or 17. They can also learn French and German as they go through the school.

The Liceo is always busy after school too. They are national champions in roller hockey, and the children learn how to roller skate here from a very young age. The rink is right under my bedroom window and this is what I often see:

The teams practise in the evenings, sometimes until 10 or 11 at night, which can be noisy! There's also a huge amount of music in the school. Much of my teaching is in the evening, and it's often accompanied by piano or singing practice. I've also heard oboes, French horns and drums - a bit distracting for the adult learners who come in after school to learn English.

Back to the kettle. The sun came out on my free morning, so I caught a bus into town. I thought I was going to the port again, but found myself at the beach: you can walk across the peninsula from one to the other in about five minutes.

I found a small, crammed hardware shop in a side street and was very pleased that I managed to track down a kettle in Spanish without knowing the word - I now know it's 'un hervidor'. The shopkeepers are all very friendly and helpful here.

Then on to Plaza de Maria Pita (see below) to buy a map. As I sat in the sun to look at it, an elderly lady struck up a conversation. She thought I must be German because I spoke a little Spanish, as she had never found an English person who spoke any before - what an indictment of our education system. We ended up having a long chat, then she pulled out a sheaf of lottery tickets from her bag and asked me to choose six numbers. After kissing the sheet and predicting that she would win a thousand euros, she retired to the shade 'because of her varicose veins'. A lovely exchange.

We've all had our ups and downs this week in school and the group celebrated the end of week one in style last night. I hope the Valencia group have had a good week too.