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Thursday, November 9th, Badalona, Spain
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Here's a question for you: Where would you go if you
were looking for a place in the Mediterranean to spend
the winter months and wanted your kids to learn Spanish?
Spain, right? WRONG!
I
have spent the past week struggling through phone calls
in my limited Spanish, picking the brains of the poor
English-speaking officials that are unlucky enough to
answer the phone, talking to other Spanish cruisers who
have been kind enough to offer us assistance, and
visiting the local school board and one of the schools
here in Badalona with our friends Rafa and Mari.
While everyone has been very kind and sympathetic, the
bottom line is that there are ZERO schools in Barcelona
that teach in Spanish. The public schools conduct
all the classes in Catalán. There are private
schools that teach in English, French and German, and
all of these also offer Spanish as a language to study,
but there are none that teach primarily in Spanish.
What were we thinking! While we knew full well
about the Catalán issue in the public schools, we
figured we could at least find a private school in
Barcelona, Spain where classes were conducted in
Spanish.
There are actually parts of Spain where kids are taught
in Spanish at school, but Barcelona and the region of
Catalunya is not one of them. Nor, for your
information, is Valencia, or Galicia. These three
regions all have their own languages. They are
truly different languages, too. Catalán is not
just a dialect of Spanish. It is a distinct
mixture of French and Spanish with maybe a little
Italian thrown in there as well. In the southern
region of Andalusia, Spanish is the native language,
although we have been warned that the Spanish spoken in
that region is heavily accented. While we did know
all of this in a general way, we decided that staying in
the primarily tourist region of Andalusia during the
winter months would drive Joe and me crazy with boredom.
We wanted a big city. We loved Sevilla, where they
do speak Spanish, but it was not a good place for the
boat. I suppose we were naive in thinking that we
could find a solution easily since we ARE in Spain,
after all.
In
the grand scheme of things, it is a minor setback.
I am sorely disappointed, though. We have two
appointments at private schools in Barcelona, today and
Monday, that teach half in English and half in Spanish.
I had a nice chat with an American woman who works at
one of them yesterday. She assures me that outside
of the English in the classroom, Spanish is the only
language spoken amongst the students. Ninety five
percent of the student body comes from Spain. It
is a pricey option but it might be our best choice if we
want to stay in Barcelona and maximize the Spanish.
I'll let you know how it goes!
Next entry
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Many thanks to our friend Craig Homenko for his assistance in setting up the website.
We also would like
to thank our buddy Scott Brunner who has been kind
enough to host the website on his server.
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