Living in Spain // Our Experience Teaching English with Cultural Ambassadors

The first half of our time here flew by! We cannot believe how fast it is going.

So what are we even doing in Spain?

We are part of the Cultural Ambassadors Program (or Auxiliares de Conversacion as they say), teaching English as a second language in two local schools. We were placed in Motril, Granada, Andalucia which is a medium-small city near the southern coast. It’s in the ‘Costa Tropical’ zone meaning we’re having a pretty balmy winter with tons of local mangoes, chirimoya and other tropical things.

In this program we work about 12 hours per week, which leaves us with A LOT of time for traveling and relaxing. 😛 We have already been taking advantage of that quite a bit: many trips to gorgeous Granada (only an hour away), Sevilla to visit Dylan’s brother Mitch, and a few trips down the coast to Nerja, Salobreña, and Malaga (the best airport hub). We were also lucky enough to hit up Stockholm, Sweden for a weekend. There we caught Ben Howard and Gregory Alan Isakov in concert, it was aaaamaaaazing! Then over our ~2.5 week Christmas break we visited 3 new countries – Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria. Also, back in November we flew home to the U.S. to shoot a wedding in Chicago! Between the travel, we kind of enjoy the VERY quiet life at our little apartment. It’s all about balance. 🙂

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We left Hancock on September 24th (Marisa’s birthday!), after hitting our local polling places to be the first people to fill out absentee ballots for the November midterms. 😛

Velodrome instant coffee saved our morning after a loooong flight over the Atlantic, going through customs in London just to switch terminals, and then waiting a few hours before security for our final flight check-in to open up.

Pro-tip: Yes, you save a good chunk of change booking the cheapest tickets available, but when that means 3 different airlines and 3 ‘opportunities’ to go through security, think again!

We arrived in Spain with one week to find an apartment, figure out where our schools were, and maybe hit the beach a time or two. Ahhhhh, the Mediterranean.

Just a glimpse of our town and the coastline, taken as we flew into Malaga!

Our landlord, and legit Spanish abuela, made us this map to our schools the day we moved in. Marisa didn’t have the heart to tell her about Google Maps…Dylan did though. 😛 oops.

Spain living means a lot of walking…

…and stray cats. Marisa is having cat withdrawals because there’s cats everrryywhere but for the most part you can’t pet them :'(

We’ve adopted some Spanish ways such as eating ‘pan y tomate’ in the mornings, and having coffee via moca pot. 

Living under an hour from the beautiful and historic city of Granada means we jaunt up there for a day trip or weekend often.

The palace/fortress complex above is the Alhambra, Spain’s number 1 tourist attraction. It dates back to around 1000 AD and was largely built in the mid 13th century by Nasrid emir Mohammed ben Al-Ahmar of the Emirate of Granada, a dynasty which ruled the area from 1230 to 1492. The latter year may sound familiar. In 1492, at the end of the Christian Reconquista, Ferdinand and Isabelle set up their royal court in the palace and gave Columbus his royal endorsement there. We’re not huge Columbus fans, but interesting fact nonetheless!

Granada has been under the rule of many different empires, both Christian and Islamic, so the layers of history are endlessly fascinating.

Public transport for the win. 🙂

We haven’t driven a car since September and are loving every minute of it.

View from our walk to the beach. You can see Motril and then the snow-capped Sierra Nevada Mountains. 🙂

Our one vegan option for eating out in our little town is a Thai delivery place. Besides churros, which are vegan, who knew? When we want delicious vegan options, we head to Granada.

However, like we said before, our region is known as the “Costa Tropical,” which means we have access to a plethora of local fruits and veggies. We love hitting up our neighborhood fruiteria for local avocados and our backyard for oranges. We’ve been spending a lot of our downtime learning awesome new vegan recipes!

This is a chirimoya (left) and a strange hybrid veggie (half potato, half zucchini) right. Our fruiteria lady is always giving us weird things to try 😛

This dude is our Spanish teacher, Alex, who’s a local to our little town and teaches us all the colloquial expressions we need to know 😉 We’ve been taking Spanish lessons twice per week since we arrived.

Marisa works in primary education (1st – 6th grades) and gets hugged by way too many children daily. It’s a good way to constantly have a head cold (lil germ boxes).

We’ve travelled to Seville to visit Dylan’s brother and went bananas on all the amazing vegan food there.

Back to Granada for vegan paella:

The hippy caves in the hills of Granada.

In the end of November, we zipped to Stockholm for some sight seeing and to see some of our favorite artists in the world, Ben Howard and Gregory Alan Isakov.

Feeling like we fit right in. 😛

We definitely want to return to Stockholm. 48 hours wasn’t quite enough time there!

A few weeks later we jetted off over the Alps to Eastern Europe with Mitch. We had Budapest, Bratislava, and Vienna on our itinerary.

Budapest was amazing. From the trams and the lovely baths, to the few vegetarian restaurants that were open over the holidays, we loved it.

^ A ruin pub with vegan pizza inside it?! Count us in!

The Széchenyi Baths – coolest part of our travels yet.

For the New Year we were in Vienna. A beautiful and busy city during the festivities!

Delicious coffee from a literal hole in the wall.

January was a month of quiet relaxation in our small town.

Our thoughts //

We are fortunate to have had money saved up before coming, as well as secondary income so we are able to do a bit more traveling and eating out than we would otherwise be able to do on the modest income from teaching English. A lot of other auxiliares pull in extra money by teaching private English lessons on the side – so we have that option too, but haven’t needed to take it.

Marisa is surprised because she thought she would have a much harder time being away from family this long, but besides being super sad to miss the Christmas traditions, she’s doing well. Neither of us are too homesick. It’s easy to feel relaxed and content as we bask in the sunshine on our back patio.

Also! We’ve been able to make some awesome Spanish friends and connections. Dylan has been playing ping pong a few times per week at the local municipal sport complex, and Marisa has made a few friends at her school. We also hang out with a fellow auxiliar and his Spanish girlfriend who live in Granada. Besides that, the program has a great extensive network of auxiliares who all hang out together quite a bit and are happy to include anyone in their plans. Sadly, no other auxiliares live in our little town, so if we want to see them we go to Granada.

We think the last few months here will be our best yet. We have our routines fully in place and we feel comfortable in our town and our schools. Our Spanish is improving daily and we (usually) have no trouble with basic communication when we’re out and about. The weather will just keep getting warmer, our backyard pool will open up, we have a lot of friends and family coming to visit, and we have some amazing trips planned. It’s going to fly by!

When we started the year, we thought we probably wouldn’t renew for a second year. Things were hard at first.. then they got better.. then they were hard again… and now they’re just really really good. Overall, this program is a really great way to experience living in Spain. We did re-apply to be placed in Malaga next year, so we’ll see what ends up happening!

Would we recommend this program to any others who are interested? Hell yeah.

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