i huelga !

That week there were strikes in some public institutions of La Laguna. Amongst others in the playgrounds. That´s the reason, why I had to work in the office of AURI, which is a group of voluntaries organizing activities for erasmus students and more. On thursday and friday then also the students striked which brought us a free day at the end of the week. Actually not bad. But nobody appreciated that day off; how could we, knowing that some teachers of the playgrounds don´t know when they will work again or IF they will work again, seeing masses of students being on strike and hearing the police siren outside every several times?! A really depressing feeling...
Nevertheless the weekend was amazing again: On this island there´s so much waiting to be discovered ;)

autumn

Today Iza and I decided to fight against the boredomn in "Reloj de fantasia" this week and to design the "tailler" in an autumnal way. For this the small group of kids were optimal. So we prepared some jigs with the shapes of leafes and animals (i.e. hedgehogs, squirrels...) which the kids used to handicraft and paint their own colourful leafes... the kids had fun- we too and the result is more than beautiful :)



all in all three days of work ;)

Los Gigantes

Salsa in hiking boots & flipflops

Yesterday we´ve been hiking at Los Gigantes. Even if it´s some one and half an hour away this trip was absolutely worth it from the very first minute on!! Los Gigantes are breathtaking themselves, left alone the circumstance that we were hiking where there were no paths at all...in about 200 meters above sea level, one wrong step and you could fall down the partially vertical cliff! Can you imagine hafing lunch in this height, sitting on a tiny wall in a row with 13 people who love hiking, the feet hanging in the air, 200 meters below them you can see the open water, on your left in far distance the city, on your right the other rocks, vertically emerging 400 meters out of the water?! Of course you can not... and even if this sounds a little bit mean: this whole day, continued with a beach stay, having a drink and salsa/ waltzer dance lessons on the street (everything in this perfekt hiking group consisting of people from every age) has been so perfect, it´s unfortunately impossible to describe it to you in a way which delivers that feeling...





Los Gigantes

monday

Today it´s a special day for me: last night it rained for the first time (a certain domstic feeling appears)  and los correos deliver three (!!) postcards for me :) you can´t imagine how glad you will be to surprisingly receive postcards from home with pictures of the landscape and some nice words! .... I just wanted to share this with you so you´ll not forget to give your address to everybody at home ;)

La Lagantija

(The last playground)

This is it. The last unknown playground ;) It´s not much left to say about it. The only specialties are that it´s actually more a garage than a big area but I didn´t see many playgrounds that are arranged with so fondly self-made (by the kids and teachers) details and where is a so trustful relationship among everybody J This is also the place where Iza and I started our first little “project”: after teaching the oldest kids the most basic sentences in German/ Polish (i.e. hello, how are you, thanks …) we showed the typical dances (Waltzer and Bolognese). Everybody had much fun but the dancing lessons afterwards hadn´t been very useful and Iza and I recognized for the first time how difficult it can be to seriously work with children, to keep them quiet and interested. Bigger projects could be exhausting… but at least as funny ;)

La Pescera Feliz

3rd playground

La Pescera Feliz. This is where I spent the last four afternoons. Just another playground. Similar to the two before. And also totally different! Like in the previous playgrounds the teachers fixed a weekly schedule with new activities every day and also the whole routine of the day resembles the former ones. Besides this the children are divided, too: the older ones attend from 15.30 to 17.30, the younger ones attend the following two hours. That´s the plan. Sadly there are every day only one to three children present during the first two hours. This means, that during this time there are altogether four teachers amusing one single child. Quite boring :( For the future I would like to offer sth like language lessons during this time. Being in that a small group is perfect for this kind of intensive work.

first language lesson

Half an hour ago I had my first language lessons :) my head is still aching.... the teacher is nobody else than Iza, my flat member, which makes things extremely easy ;) from now on I will (finally after almost one month) have 3 hours of lessons per week (2x 1.5 hours). The most important thing is now to learn as many vocabulary as possible! I already recognised that it´s quite easy to learn those vocabularies which are known from Latin but also extremely difficult to learn the completely unknown ones as they are so similar... work is waiting!!