TEFLees in Spain

I love to travel.

I love airports.

I love layovers and stewardesses and suitcases and new stamps in my passport.  I love duty-free vodka and packaged sandwiches and earphones that only work on planes because they have two prongy things.

I enjoy making friends with the beautiful Danish men who may sit next to me and giving directions to confused people and pulling pretend-looking money from ATMs.  I like watching people hug and cry and yell in foreign languages and making up stories about them in my head.

Most of all, I appreciate the stage of transition.  I thrive in-between.  I relish being missing-in-action — not being in a particular place or with certain people or with any responsibilities.  Maybe traveling is special to me because I can’t — and I’m not expected to — accomplish much more than arriving at point B.   This is almost mandatory space to reflect and anticipate.  Cushion.  Buffer.

Time to think about my life and my plans and my friends and my TEFLees.  Time to think back on all that has changed — and all that has stayed the same — since my last introspective airport terminal appointment.  Time to appreciate how lucky I am to be on the way to my destination or on the way from my origin.  Time to hide in a hole with gobs of other people just like me.

That’s life in Spain to me.  The big standstill transition where I am allowed to relax, spend too much money, meet strangers, and think.  Life in Madrid is my layover that gives me time off the record to enjoy the journey.

Anyone who has done a TEFL course as intensive as ours knows the feeling of four walls getting closer and closer together as the course goes on. Virtually living with the same people for four consecutive weeks while challenging your cognitive abilities with symbols that you don’t recognize (but friendly tutors tell you are the core of pronouncing your own language) can stretch the limits of even the most patient soul.
I (and all of my friends) don’t find myself particularly patient, and I go through this process with new batches of people every month. I like to think of it as personal growth training. However, it must be said that through the course of the month, special relationships are built. Like fungi, the oddest people will grow on you until you don’t even recognize them as foreign or toxic existences.

At the end of the course, I think all TEFLees are surprised by the odd restlessness that comes along with liberation from the course. While graduation night is a triumphant (albeit incestuous on occasion) celebration of deliverance, the consistent behavior in the week that follows speaks louder than the actions of one night.

They always miss us. Or maybe it isn’t us. Maybe it’s this building, or maybe it is each other, or maybe it’s the free tea and coffee or the odd magnets of Asian people on our fridge. Or maybe, against all odds, Natasha and Temura have succeeded in making this place a nest to return to when the flight gets a bit long. Along with the resources and work advice provided in that crucial first week, I can’t help but assume that constant flow of graduates in the office come at least in part for the community.

This month has been unique not in that the TEFLees have missed us, but in that I have missed them. After a while, I start to take for granted that every month I meet adventurous diverse people who are willing to move to a foreign country, learn a new language, and wander away from everything they know. I forget to feel lucky that I get to be the first contact to people on the first step of an adventure.

For whatever reason, that jaded cynicism didn’t happen this month. Last week was the final week with a ridiculously energetic (and at times obnoxiously positive) course that I loved spending my month with. Today, being surrounded by new teachers who have more classes offered to them than they know how to sort through, I can’t believe I get paid to adopt TEFLees.