One of the most delightful parts of Language School so far (at least for me) is the walking tours they have on Fridays. The guy who leads them is very fun to listen to, so I forgive him for walking extremely fast.

Yesterday's theme was upcoming holidays, which are - let me see if I've learned my lessons properly -

6 December - Constitution Day, when the current constitution was accepted after Franco died
8 December - day of the immaculate conception of Mary
22 December - official Christmas lottery drawing day, apparently it is traditional to split the cost of a ticket among a group of family & friends
24 December - Christmas Eve which is apparently the real party
25 December - Christmas of course
26 December - saint day for San Esteban, who is not extremely notable as a saint but people like having an extra day off to travel home after Christmas
28 December - day of the innocents which for whatever reason is a prank holiday here, like April Fools
31 December - New Year's Eve of course
6 January - Three Kings Day, for which there will be a parade and a speech by the mayor to "welcome the three kings", and kids can personally deliver their "please give me gifts" letters

December 6, 8, 25-26, New Year's Day and January 6 are all "días festivos", government holidays when schools and most businesses are closed.

Why did this topic need to be a walking tour? It doesn't, but there's supposed to be a walking tour every Friday and this week all the Friday special things are supposed to be holiday themed, so there we were.

Of course most of these are Christian and/or specifically Catholic holidays, but our teacher managed to spend most of his time talking about local history. While explaining Constitution Day he had to interrupt himself multiple times to remind himself to summarize briefly and not get too far off track (and he still ended up telling us about how Juan Carlos I accidentally shot his brother, and about the suppression of the Catalan language during the dictatorship.)

He also told us about how December 8, in addition to being a Catholic holiday, is also the anniversary of a 16th century battle over Spain's control of parts of what is now Belgium and the Netherlands, wherein Spanish army forces were beseiged on an island by enemy ships? But the Spanish troops won? I want to learn more about this, but I didn't catch the name of the location where it happened.

He also taught us a lovely expression, "ajo y agua" - "garlic and water" which is a minced oath / abbreviation for a longer phrase that means "go fuck yourself and deal with it".

Last night I was making dinner on the electric stove, and I turned off one of the burners and... it didn't turn off. By which I mean I turned the dial to off and it kept heating- the heating element kept periodically glowing red and then going dark, as this stove normally does when cooking, and the indicator light that tells you the stovetop is on stayed on. Sparkly and I both did everything we could think of as far as wiggling the dials, to no avail. I finished making dinner and then went to the circuit breaker box, where I was grateful to discover that the stove is on its own circuit, so I could cut power to it and keep everything else (esp the refrigerator) on.

- Doing a grammar exercise with an example sentence that mentions "calling Jesús". Classmate rephrases this sentence in a way that is very much not what the teacher intended- he was picturing "calling Jesús" not as getting on whatsapp to talk to a guy, but instead as going to church and praying.
- We look at a list of words that were selected as the prettiest words in Spanish by an online poll. Teacher is amazed by the fact that none of us like any of the words on the list. Student says that words with the letter Z in them are "aggressive", teacher laughs his ass off.
- The word for bedsheet is mentioned in passing, teacher asks us if any of us can explain what it means for the students who don't know it. After some uncertain attempts, the best explanation any of us can come up with is "clothes for the mattress".