Well as you can see from the title of the blog I´m an Irish man living in Spain. I left Dublin in April 2005 not knowing what Spain would be like nor which part of Spain I was going to live. You may be thinking "why Spain" ? Well the answer is a hot Spanish girl influenced me !!!
When I first arrived I didn´t speak Spanish and thought thats great I´ll have at least the summer off to learn Spanish and at the same time have a great summer. Well that plan got ripped away when I got a job in an electrical company a month after I arrived and since then I´ve given up the tools and changed jobs a couple of times.
Here the first thing you´ll see thats different to Irish life ... the SUN. Here in Murcia I think we get over 300 days of sun, this really does put a smile on peoples face and seems to make the people more open and very friendly. Another thing is the food they have so much variety over here and the time table is a little different to that of Ireland. Lunch time over here normally consists of at least two courses then coffee and usually eaten between 2 and 4 o clock. Then dinner is at about 9pm and sometimes could go on until about 10:30 ... this meal depending on the house can be pretty heavy aswell but thats down to each house and what there used to.
After about 6 months mixing with only Spanish people I could see myself getting better with the language and more comfortable speaking it. During these 6 months I had gone to some free spanish classes and picked up alot because there were not alot of students in the class ... I think there was 4 in total which was brilliant because the teacher had a lot of time for us. Learning a language you´ll always make mistakes but sometimes there really funny mistakes like for example : one time instead of asking for a breast of chicken (Pollo) I asked for a breast of Dick (Polla) the waitress just smiled and corrected me) hahahaha.
Well this is my first blog, there will be more over the next few days !!
You forgot to mention you had a head start with the language i.e. Elena putting yellow postits on every item in the house translated into Spanish! The highlight was when you asked for breast of dick....
ResponderEliminarBtw Id like to argue the point that Ireland has less variety when it comes to food. I think Ireland has changed a lot in the past few years, gone are the Potatoes & Boiled veg my friend...People are way more experimental with food and now thats spilled into normal meal times.
Yes now you have all the foreigners bringing their own typical dishes and showing you how to cook them ha ha ha. Get over it Shane, that´s life.
ResponderEliminarPS: The irish chippers are lovely and we don´t have anything like that here.