Spain Day 5 – Enjoying the Vaughan Town program

*Please note I wrote this while traveling a few weeks ago on February 19th, 2013

I woke up this morning feeling pretty tired after staying up at the bar last night. 1:30am isn’t really that late when you think about it, but after how busy we are all day I’m actually pretty tired by 10pm. I think I’ll be good tonight and come straight to bed after dinner.

This morning my improve group had an hour to practice. Then I had a one-on-one with a fun young woman with black and red hair named Mayra. We walked out to the main road and to the right of the resort, in search of a river that people swim in in the summer. Sadly we didn’t find it and instead ended up at a dead end road that was down a muddy road. It had been raining last night and this morning and we were low on time, so I took a photo of the muddy road and we returned to the resort for our next activity. Hopefully we will find the river before the end of the week, but if not then at least Mayra and I will always have “the road” and our fun search to remember.

The activity before lunch was a 1.5 hour presentation workshop. It’s designed to help the Spaniards practice their English presentation, and the Anglos participate too. It was a nice refresher on the content and structure of a presentation.

Then we had lunch. Today I had spare ribs made mostly of fat, lunch was a bit of a let down today. But I had good company and spent time chatting with another Anglo named Kathleen. She’s into cameras and it was nice to have someone to talk tech with. After lunch during our siesta Kathleen and I met up and took some photos around the property. We found the horses again which was a treat. I let her try a few of my lenses and showed her a few technical things on the camera which she really enjoyed. She’s a lot of fun and I’m really glad I’ve met her.

I’ve been told today multiple times by different people throughout the day, that I was excellent in the play last night and great at staying in character. I’ve also been told that I am a good teacher, that speaking English with me is fun and very easy for the Spaniards. It’s only my second day here in the Vaughan Town program but so far I’ve heard a lot of kind feedback from both Spaniards and Anglos and its really making me think about skills that I haven’t paid much attention to. I’ve definitely got information to take home and do some soul searching with.

After siesta we had another group activity. This time we had to split into groups with a mix of Spaniards and Anglos and played a game similar to charades. It was really funny and I’ll always remember the silly acting our group did whenever I hear the name “Bill Clinton”.

Then I had a one-on-one hour with Hugo (pronounced similar sounding to you-go). He is a complex man with interesting ideas and also looks a little bit like Javier Bardem. We are in the improve group together, so once we worked through the suggested “phrases” our one-on-one then we spent the remainder of our time flushing out the ideas for our skit.

At 7pm Hugo and I met with the rest of our improve group to finalize the details and rehearse for our 8pm performance. To be honest we didn’t have much time to rehearse but I feel like we created a pretty interesting and funny skit anyhow. Our improve group consisted of Spaniards: Hugo & Alex and Anglos: Sue, Susan and I. We created a comedic skit about a small claims courthouse (similar to the TV show Judge Judy). Our two cases in question included a fake hand due to a lawnmower accident and a custody case regarding a zebra statue. We had a really great time. We performed our skit at 8pm and two other skits followed ours. It was such a great time!

This evening during various conversations I received more compliments. Mostly complimenting me on my leadership skills and creative thinking. I’m noticing that I do look to take charge of a situation in order to keep it moving along or to complete a task. I’m learning a lot about myself. Over the last few years I’ve kind of been feeling uninterested in meeting people and even feeling kind of shy. I definitely don’t feel shy anymore and I can’t wait to learn more about people. It’s as if I’ve been coasting through social situations in a sleepy haze for the last few years and now I’ve finally woken up, and man am I glad that I have! I’m curious to see what else I will learn about myself or what changes will take place in the next few days.

After another delicious dinner we all played a trivia game / pop quiz about countries, pop culture and movies. It was a lot of fun! Afterwards I returned to my room to get some sleep. So that’s all for now, good night.