As with any walk of life, the untimely departure of any of our Erasmus friends is hard. By untimely departure I do not mean death, merely that they move on to better things elsewhere. They migrate to other jobs, universities or even countries, or return to their native lands to carry on with the rest of their lives.
This is to be expected, years like these where we spend our time bouncing from bar to bar and beach to beach while convincing ourselves we are studying or working hard cannot last forever. However long your Erasmus placement is, whether it be 3 weeks or 9 months as mine is, the time flies by far too fast and people start to move on to new things.
It rapidly comes to the point where we must part ways, which has happened here this past weekend. I shall not go into details about this, nor shall I break the trust or annonymity of the person who has moved on to greener pastures, but that doesn’t make saying goodbye any easier. I know them well enough to know publicity isn’t what they are looking for, so I shall merely say this-
All of us here will miss you dearly, we wish you the very best wherever you end up, and there will always be a spare room open to you in our respective countries and hopefully for us in yours too. Thank you for having been such a good friend to us all, and I hope to see you again one day, perhaps in Australia…
Now on to a happier note. This weekend has also seen the arrival of a very close friend of mine from home for a long weekend away in Spain to escape the diabolical weather of our home nation. In my endless wisdom I invited my friend to join me at work on Friday, thinking nothing would go wrong. Yet as proved many times before, my endless wisdom often leaves much to be desired. The children were aware that my friend was to arrive, and had prepared well in advance by learning various phrases of colourful language in English with which to proposition him, without realising entirely what half of them actually meant. This made for a farily interesting day of trying to teach them something practical, while trying to keep the girls attention fixed on the textbooks instead of my friends dreamy face. None of the things they said were appropriate at the time, nor are they appropriate to be repeated here, but believe me it left little to the imagination. I am highly unimpressed by the children in all honesty, and shall be having stern words with a select few once my friend returns home.
But until then there are things to do, places to go, people to annoy, classes to teach and preparations to be made for the school trip to Manchester on thursday. So for now i’ll sign off by saying one last thing to my friend who has left Vigo-
I found a place with better guacamole than the usual restaurant, you’d better come back…
The Rain in Spain... 