Day 6

Today was Monday. We kicked off the week with a visit to Moncadas local market. Many people came away with purchases and no doubt had some bargains! The most popular bargain was a type of shoe called "Fossys" which were getting sold for 5 Euros each, however people managed to barter the price down to 4 Euros. Once everybody had bought their stuff we then went back to our accomodation to drop off the stuff.

After the market we went to our daily Spanish lesson. During the first session (lasting an hour and a half) we learnt body parts, then we had a man called Ariel in the second half whom tought us Spanish words relating to sport. Ariel uses mainly Spanish, however he was completely able to control our group and get us doing his drills.

For lunch we went to a Spanish resturant which we hadn´t been to before, the food in this resturant was muy bien (very good). We ate spaghetti bolgnese which isn´t my personal favourite but was by far my favourite meal of the trip. After the spaghetti bolgnese we all managed to fit in 3 scoops of ice cream (vanilla, chocolate and strawberry) so the lunch was a very nice change and a huge success.

After we had stuffed our we got stuck in to creating session plans for our first session as, during the week, we will all be coaching and delivering activities to Spanish children. This meant we had to learn Spanish words relating to our session as English is rarely spoken here. Once finished and confident about delivering our session, we headed back to our rooms to get ready.

At 5pm we headed down to the meeting room to head off to the metro, the metro is our main source of transport, so missing that would be a disaster. However we all got there on time and had a safe journey to our sporting arenas.

I was coaching tennis, however the other sports taking place were football, basketball, triathlon and swimming. In my session I took a 10 minute warm up which felt like a success as they were all enjoying themselves and laughing (hopefully not laughing at me), and from what I have heard everybody else felt the same, so this was a really nice experience for us all. When finished we went to the metro again to go back to our home town Moncada.

When we arrived in Moncada we were all tired and hungry as the day had been very draining due to coaching spanish children. We went back to our new Spanish resturant and we were hoping it would be just as nice as the lunch we had. As the dinner arrived everyone was confused as it was not known to us all (not even something Jamie Oliver would create), the only way to describe it was a deep fried folded pizza with cheese and ham in it; there was a mixed opinion of it as whilst some liked it, others didn´t. However the desert opened some eyes, as it was chocolate covered fruit (kiwi, banana and melon) whith ice cream at the bottom to mix it with, this was nice but easily got a little sickly.

Then we all went back to the rooms to get some well deserved sleep and charge ourselfs for the up and coming days with the Spanish.

Gracias,

Oli