Setting off for a new chapter....

Plane ticket has been booked and I'm off to Spain in 11 days. Wow, it's sort of settling in....even if the suitcases haven't.

It's not so much going to a foreign country (not that Spain is too foreign after so many visits) but a combination of a) I haven't been to this particular city before, b) I'm going for the longest duration thus far, c) I will be working (hopefully) and living in one place for a while. Most challenging of all? The torture of saying goodbye to everyone at home! It's not torturous to say goodbye, really, but the actual act of leaving smiling faces and coming to face unfamiliar ones on my own! In another language that I'm not 100% comfortable in, just yet..... Parting is always a sad time, even if true friends are here to stay and absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all those cliched phrases. No amount of cheesiness will make it easy to say farewell for this emotional nut!

So I face the prospect of living and teaching English to children/teens and perhaps adults, all Spaniards and with a unique set of problems learning our special and "exceptional" (=lots of exceptions) language. Being able to isolate the common errors means I will know just what to say when I'm trying to speak Spanish--translate and restate. :)

Over the 9 months, I hope to become fluent in Spanish to the best of my abilities, even with the seemingly impossible tasks of mastering (or at least tackling with skill) conjugation of a flood of verbs and usage of the ever-frustrating subjunctive. Maybe then my French will start trickling back into a comprehensible stream rather than a mix of gobbledygook.

I know that this time will involve a lot of adjustment to the culture--adapting to the timetable, adjusting my eating and drinking habits, tolerating the smoking (this will be my biggest peeve, I'm sure) and lots and lots of learning.

Of course I will miss so many things of home...the beautiful mountains and lovely parks and seaside, the diversity of people and cultures, the wonderfully delicious and cheap ethnic food, the Anglo-society, the relaxed and casual west-coast lifestyle......it'll go on and on. You don't know what you've got till it's gone, right? I'm sure I will find myself missing one thing or another over the next little while.

So in the meantime, this is a start of another adventure full of many mini-adventures! I'm excited, nervous, anxious, eager, curious, sad....a mixed bag in anticipation of the change in my life to come!