Stopping and Starting

Am starting to get my back blips on as the last few weeks on this current course have been a bit of a challenge to say the least!  I'm on an afternoon course this month, which is officially from 12-8pm, but of course my colleague Claire and I are there before 12 and leave the school at 8.30pm, and it's usually around 9.15 by the time I get home and eat and sleep!  The school where I work in summer here in Barcelona is in the process of losing three floors of their current building and moving those floors to a building across the street - chaos in other words.  It's now settled down a bit and on Friday for the first time since we started over two weeks ago, my colleague and I got a desk we can call our own and actually sit there together and leave things on it.  The aircon hasn't been working in parts of the school, including the room where we've been doing teaching practice and in outside temperatures of around 30 with high humidity, it's been almost unbearable.  We've now moved to another room, which is a bit better.  All of this has, understandably, put extra pressure on our 12 trainees, who've had problems with having access to sufficient computers, printers and photocopiers and Claire and I have been at the coalface, having to deal with it all and try to come up with solutions.  

I've seen this sign before and yesterday it made me smile again.   Bb and I were sitting under it having a drink before crossing the street to have fish tapas at what we call the 'mother and daughter fish place'.   

Speaking of mothers and daughters, we have one of each in our house at the moment as guests.  They've also been a bit of a challenge, treating our house more like a hotel than home-sharing and yesterday I was gobsmacked when I found they had opened and had a chunk of a new pack of Orkney cheese, which had been given to us as a gift and we had been saving for a rainy day.  Then I noticed they had also opened a new pack of parmesan too!!  When we walked out last night we had to remind ourselves that our guests are usually lovely, know how to home-share respectfully, and that those two are exceptions.