Second Full Week Begins

21 January 2026------------- Two weeks since I left the States, my language classes began this past Monday. That has begun to bring some order to life. Class day, with a conversation workshop tacked on to the end, goes about four and a half hours - Mon/Wed/Fri is morning to early afternoon, TueTh early afternoon to early evening, also known as late afternoon here. Four and a half hours pretty much does me in, truth be told. There's a lot to follow, minute by minute, and especially draining when you're barely keeping your head above water much of the time. There are five of us in my beginner class. Four of us are pensionistas, like myself - retired more or less. Mateusz is a 50-ish conultant from Stockholm, Zoe is from Belfast (a favotite Irish city of mine), Edwin and Jeenok are a Korean-American couple from Warren, NJ, Sam's old stomping grounds. We have rotating teachers, and virtually every word they speak in class is in Spanish. Sink or swim. I guess that's what they mean by immersion. Although everyone in my group is 50+, there are lots of young people in Escuela Taronja. Seems a good mix. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Everyone in my group seems jealous of the fact that I'm in for the better part of three months. They're all doing a couple few weeks at most. At first I felt that I was an outlier, wondering if I had over-committed, until learning there were more multi-monthers in our midst - just not in my group yet. Hoping to meet more like me as time goes on. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- We have jumped immediately into tense, declension, person, et.al., plus vocabulary of course. My language in high school was Latin - on the positive side, a Romance language, on the negative, more written than spoken. So I'm at a bit of a disadvantage vis a vis those who have multiple spoken language study behind them - French, German, Swedish, Polish, Korean. I shoulder on. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 22 January 2026------------ Another rock 'n rollin' day in class today. Felt at sea more than I wanted to but realize that when I decided to do this, my mind's eye played a movie that had a beginning (new city, new experiences, new cuisine)...and an end, a new skill under my belt and a feeling of "I did that!" but the middle of the movie was somewhat undefined, and now I realize that I just have to live the middle. The living part is, well, new and different..................................... But tonight (Thursday) feels like a Friday since there are no classes tomorrow. Escuela Taronja is taking the whole school by train to Benicassim, a seaside village about 75 km from Valencia, for Fiesta Paella, an annual music, dance and culinary festival where hundreds of pans of paella are cooked over open flame, outside, all over town, for the pure love of this very Valencian dish. It is said there will be leaping over bonfires. I will report...