In general, we work from Monday to Thursday. There are opportunities to teach on Fridays, but we decided to decline those on account that we wanted to travel. Instead, our Monday through Thursday schedules are pretty packed. There are classes that begin at 8 in the morning and you can teach classes until 9 or 10 at night. Classes are usually scheduled around the normal workday. For example, they are an hour or two before work (at 8am), or they are at lunchtime or they are after work. This means that there are several hours in the day when we don't teach. At times, it can be frustrating, but I find a good book makes the time fly.
On Mondays, I work in the north of Madrid at an area called Alcobendas. It's outside of downtown and is mostly business buildings.
The metro stop is Ronda de la Comunicación. It takes about an hour to travel there from home, unfortunately.
Those large glass buildings are Telefonica. They used to be the only telephone and internet service in Madrid. Now, there are competing services, but they all have to work through Telefonica because they established the phone lines.
In the next few pictures, you can see the Guadarrama mountain range bordering the buildings.
Also, I can see these four skyscrapers from Ronda. These four skyscrapers were recently completed in 2008. Each was funded by the money earned in selling important Real Madrid (the soccer team) players to other teams. I know that one was funded with the money from selling David Beckham and I cannot remember the others.
Twice a week, I travel even farther north to La Moraleja. This is the wealthiest neighborhood in Madrid. Near the metro stop, there are mostly large businesses. Both A and I teach classes here at Cap Gemini, which is an international company that produces computer programs and software. That's the best explanation I can give. It's a French company, but it has locations all over the world.
Not all of our classes are for businesses in the north. We also teach private classes to individuals who just want to learn English. For some students, I travel to their homes in Madrid and others prefer to come to my home for class. I really enjoy these classes because the students really want to learn English! Also, they love to tell me more about their Spanish culture.
It's nice to have a balance between business classes and private classes. With business classes, you are always going to have class on that day and time. Even if no one attends the class, you still get paid because the company pays for X amount of classes. The only problem is that the pay is low and you sometimes have students who are forced to learn English. In general, we have been lucky, since most of our business classes are filled with students enthused with improving their fluency. With private classes, you can name your price for the lessons.
So this is our daily life here. At times it is tiring and difficult, but our students make us love our job!
We have just returned from a wonderful trip to Paris! In that short weekend, I somehow took 400 photos! We will be posting highlights from the trip soon!
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