Long-lasting brief trips

         What??? Long-lasting or brief? Well..., both in fact! Don't frown like that, let me explain it. Have you ever took a vacation for just a few days, but in your mind it lasted much longer as you remembered it with great fondness?

        This happens mainly with those first trips on your own. I have a pair of good examples:

      My mother's holiday in Schwitzerland
             
             Today, my mum was silent with her typical dreamy smile... So I said: You're in Schwitzerland in this very moment, right? 
- How do you know it?
- Your face speaks for you! :)

          She was there this october just for 12 days to visit my brother and his, by that time, girlfriend. Well, her vacation began the day she knew she was going... Immediately afterwards, started looking for a cheap flight to Milan, then going shopping and deciding what kind of clothes she might need there, wondering what to give them as a present to thank them for putting her up... Even the search of a good suitcase was made with utter eagerness. And once she found it, it was ready almost one week before the departure day!

         No, no, guys! Don't raise your eyebrows like that. Her behaviour wasn't odd at all, ultimately that was her first time doing a lot of things. Her first:
* True holiday.
* Time abroad.
* Flight.
* Time alone for so many days.
* Try to speak and understand a different language. (She's really proud of being capable of going to the supermarket in Lugano and buying all the things she needed) Even now she often asks: Do you guess how "X" is called in italian?  :) That's why I use to say that her brief vacation is being a long-lasting one, as at times she still seems to be there! Her thoughts are always there! She really enjoyed it before it had started, while it was going on and even now, so many months later!

           My english course in Kettering, England



Stratford-upon-Avon

               Its real length was just one month... But I could hardly sit down with anticipation during the two preceding months! And, like my mother, after coming back I would be always going on about it, because that trip was  full of first times too (I was just 17):
* 1st time alone on my own for one whole month.
* 1st vacation.
* 1st time abroad.
* 1st time speaking English almost all day
* I had never met so many people from so many different places...

(No, not that first time you're thinking of! Don't be gossip!!)

        We can make many more trips to amazing places, but admittedly none of them will be quite the same, won't them? For one thing, first times only happen once!!
   

Don't weep around the corners, guy!

       If there's something that get on my nerves, it's narrow minded people. Yesterday I came completely by chance into a post written by an english man living in Galicia. The thing is that in his post this guy moaned about galician language. All right about this... But he complains about galician language being taught at school. Can you believe it?!? If you are living and working in a country, you're expected to be able to speak its language, indeed! We are spanish and galician, therefore we speak and also study both of them.

          If you can't teach your children something you don't know, at least let us teach ours something we do know and even don't know but want them to learn. By this I also mean english. As you'll have regarded, mine is rather bad... However I do want my children to learn it and learn it with the utmost accuracy... I can't teach them properly, so I want them to learn it at school, so that they'll be better at it than me.

         I'm sick to death of being critizised for speaking my language in my land. And even be called narrow minded... ME, who always want to learn everything about eveywhere. NO COMMENTS! What about YOU, who don't learn anything at all about anywhere? Galician people speak galician with each other, but we switch to spanish when we talk to other people so, what on earth do you care what I speak with my people in the place where we live?!

         I really needed to get this off my chest, and a good old moan every now and then is very healthy!

Wonderwoman real story

            My great grandaunt Gumersinda died when I was 16 or so, nevertheless I've not forgotten her. For one thing she and her sister were the two people who brought me up as my father worked in Switzerland and my mother and grandparents were always too busy working at our farm and weren't able to look after me. Today I'm going to tell you her story.

           She was born in 1904 and was orphaned 6 years later, when her mother died after having birth a less able babygirl. So Gumersinda, who had just turned 6, was sent to the priest's house to work as a servant, where she was to stay until the priest died, around which time she was fortyish. In her twenties she had been about to marry a young man, but the damn priest didn't allow them! From that time onwards she wasn't to have any other relationships with any other men and, strange as it may seem, she remained working for that boss as if nothing had happened... Well, not so weird, actually, as she was really reliant on that job since she had no other place to live in. Furthemore she was the only person who cared after her disturbed sister Erundina as all their other siblings had emigrated to Argentina.

           During all those years she had been setting money aside in order to get built her own house, aim which she achieved. Both Gumersinda and Erundina moved into their humble dwell and soon afterwards, Gumersinda asked my grandparents (my grandmother was her niece) to come and live with them. She needed someone who looked after her sister while she was working and, in return, she would help them by sharing her home. Her propposal came out of the blue since they had had a relationship for roughly 15 years, but hadn't married because they were really poor and had neither a house to live in nor the money to get one built or to buy a piece of land where they could work. So they inmediately accepted.

          They went on being a poor family and everyone had to work. My grandfather emigrated to Switzerland where he worked for several years in the railways , my grandmother was a dressmaker, Erundina had 3 or 4 cows, one pig and several hens and rabbits, and Gumersinda had managed to become a great chef while working as a servant, which turned out to be really helpful every time the family had economical problems (too often). She used to work in places that were something like 20 km away and she went there on foot and alone! She left early in the morning and came back late at night... Amazing tireless brave woman!

         A few years later my great grandaunt found a new job. She was to be an important doctor's servant for several years. His wife was a teacher and, having seen Gumersinda couldn't read or write, she taught her for free. The first letter she was able to read made her cry, both with joy (she was truly reading a letter addressed to her for the first time in her whole life!) and sorrow, as she was told to return home as soon as possible because her sister was very ill.

        Take notice she had lost her mother being a very little girl, and from that very moment onwards she had to work really hard all her life. Despite her life was dreadfully difficult, she would always try to help everbody and care for everyone. Having never going to school, while working as a servant for rich people, she perfectly learnt how to look after herself so that no-one could ever cheat her, even being single and poor as she was.

        In a nutshell, working restless she managed to got her house built, paid her social security and her sister's, gave my grandparents a home, and brought up my mother, my brother and me. Was one of the first people in the hamlet who had electricity and running water, helped to dig her own well... By the way, thanks heavens we still have it, if not our farm would run out of water in summer. It never ever gets dry! Still useful and even essential so many years later!

        Last but not least, my parents built a bigger house as the family was growing and Gumersinda agreeded to convert her own old house (which had required so many efforts to be built) into a farm in order we could have many more cows. But she knew it was a great step forward, so... I usually wonder who else would have done that. I'll tell you: NO-ONE! It must have been sooooooo heartbreaking seeing her beloved house being smashed down...  This proves she was a wonderful woman, a real angel, don't you think so?
        

A new chapter in my life

        In the end, today I've been asked if I would like to work again for the bosses I have been looking forward to working for. I'm so happy! I'm feeling really lucky right now! But not everyone feels in the same way: in the mornig, while explaining my boyfriend the conditions I could see his disappointment... He is earnig nearly the double I'll earn, you know what I mean... Nervertheless it doesn't bother me at all! I'm pretty fed up with always trying to fulfil someone's else expectations about me. From now on I'll just try to be happy on my own way. Never mind what other people might think or expect. For goodness' sake, my life is mine!

         My boyfriend, my family and most of my friends are just aware that I'm not going to work as a vet... And none of them seem to realize or regard that that's EXACTLY what I most want! I'm very tired of being a vet, awfully cheesed off! They simply can't see or undestand my happyness and I can't help but wondering what they care more.

        I'm going to be paid 950 euros/month. It's certainly not too much, but it's the best job I can get right now and I'm willing to start as soon as possible.

Cuarterlife crisis

        

  I've just turned 30 and haven't yet reached none of those things I'm supposed to have... Neither a good job nor my own family. And to tell you the truth, they both still seem beyond my reach. Concernig the job; I'd been working for a few years for a vets' team where partnership didn't exist and there wasn't a good rapport. Even the bosses weren't on good terms with each other. They didn't teach me anything at all and little did they care whether I was feeling comfortable there or not. I was so fed up with the situation and with the work itself that I left it nearly one year ago, even before getting a new one, but I didn't care! I really needed a fresh start, and I don't just mean that job, but that kind of work. I'm looking forward to switching careers! Working as a vet can be very stressful many times. The problem is that I don't have the knowledge or the experience to do it.

          Then, in the summer, I came across an advertisement for a vet in a nearby village, so I applied, was choosen and worked there during the whole summer, while the other workers enjoyed their holidays. It seems that my new bosses liked me. :) So, to cut a long story short, as they're opening a new branch in a different town, they asked me to work again for them, but not as a vet, but as a shopper with wide knowlegde about drugs. Thus I'd be able to advise customers properly when they came to buy them. I inmediately loved the idea and accepted. Who knows, this may be my chance of shifting away from veterinary practise and towards a different area. I'm not ambitious at all, I just wish to live my life in a quiet way.

           The short supply of good jobs (or just normal jobs) nowadays is the main reason for my boyfriend and me not being to live together yet. He's thirtysomething, has worked as an engineer for almost five years, all of them away from home, and now when he's quite experienced and supposedly would be able to find the job of his dreams, all our plans have exploded with the outbreak of this bloody crisis. Our parents at our age were reasonably comfortably off, however we must face the fact that we'll probabily be poorer than them all our life. My biological clock doesn't stop whispering me: "the time to become a mum has come, has come, has come..." But the economical security hasn't arrived yet, so litttle can I do!