An Interview With A 9 Year Old

Today Atticus is home sick from school and his brother is off on an overnight excursion to a farm in Torrelaguna http://www.ceieljarama.com/  We are excited to learn about his experiences! In the meantime, I am going to take advantage of Atticus's sedentary state to interview him.

1. What is the thing that has most surprised you?

That there is subways and trains and busses.

2. What is the biggest difference between your life in Spain and your life at home?

That we have a small apartment, that we have to take an elevator to get to it and it is really small. It is smaller than small. Smaller than a house.

3. Are there any differences in the food?

Food is cheaper and better. It just tastes better. They use a fork to eat french fries. And there is this really yummy snack that doesn't look good at all - it is bread with chocolate and cheese - and it looks so gross but it is sooo good.  I could eat it every day. It is like they just grow it.  There is tortilla española and that is so good and always hanging up on the walls a bunch of pig legs and this one pig leg it was 125 Euros a kilo.  And if you have one it is a very good honor and they have this tool to get the meat off of the leg and all you have left is the bone and you hang it with the hooves so you can tell what kind of animal it is.
There is this one place and they sell churros con chocolate and right when you're buying one he is making some so they are so fresh and so yummy, yummy, yummy in my tummy. You usually eat breakfast at the same time except for you only have a couple of cookies but then you have lunch at like 2 and then you have dinner at 10.  During lunch you eat the most. During dinner it is a little more than breakfast.


3. Tell me about school.

We go to school at 9, then we don't have recess we go out for 30 minutes at 11:30 and I play soccer. The playground isn't a playground it is a court. It is a basketball court with two basketball hoops and right next to it is a cement soccer court and all of it is surrounded by houses. There are 3 games of soccer being played with only 2 soccer field goals and two games of kickball going on in that same place so it is so hard to play and once we played girls versus boys and it was 1-91. They only had one because we let them get one by the goalie not being the goalie. Every second someone yelled "goooooooooooool" for us. And that was only in 30 minutes, folks, 30 minutes. And there are no basketballs.
At 12:30 we go out of the school so you can go home and your mom makes lunch for you and you eat. Then you go back at 2:30 and you go home at 4:30.
My classroom is really small -like our apartment- and we don't have lockers just in the classroom we have little hooks on the walls so we can hang up our backpack. And we have so many grades in our school, so we have three year olds up to sixth grade. We have one first grade, two second grades, and the rest have one class per grade, too.  And there are some people who have been working at our school for forty years. And there are some people at our school who are eighty years old. I don't know who, that's what Celia said.
PE is my favorite class and when we have it we either talk about the rules if it is a new game we haven't done yet and then we go out to the court to practice or we do it in the gym which is so small.  It's like half the size of our classroom. Or we have it on the court. And I especially like Friday gym days because right when we go to school we just put our backpack down and go right out to the court! You have to wear a uniform. (chandal)
My second favorite class is art which we have on Thursday and Friday. It's totally free, you can go get something to do or we have these art books which you can do and every art time I finish either one or two things.
I also have science and I have a different teacher for that. And I also have math - that's the same basically- except for that we can write in our books because we bought our books.  You have to buy your books, clothes and uniforms. (Parent note: my total for both kids for all of this was around 400 Euros.) We don't have to pay for the teachers' teaching.  We have music and have a different teacher for that but he comes into our classroom and starts singing a song with his guitar and we have to put our heads down and then we have to start doing work after about 30 minutes of that and we also have religion class and that is when we have this religion book and they talk about stuff and I usually fall asleep in that because I can't understand them.
And we have this language class and it's like fixing up your Spanish and how to write stuff except I go to a special class I get for a month and I usually have it twice a day and I usually have it during Language and I first go with this guy named Diego in the morning and then for afternoon I have this girl named Celia and she teaches third grade and Diego teaches music. They are really nice except for you can tell how teachers are if they are a boy or a girl because with Diego I get in, he tells me what I have to do, I do it and he writes a "bien" because I always get a bien and then he gives me the next page and with Celia sometimes she gives me a tour where we walk around the school and she tells me how to say things in Spanish and one time we went to the lunch room and a lunch lady gave me a cookie and our school is connected to a church so I went in and I saw these cool glass things and they were pictures and we went outside and it looked really boring except when we were in the church. They are stained glass windows.
My teacher Marisa is really nice and it's so funny how the teachers here can be talking all nice to me and then without even looking around the classroom another kid is doing somehting he's not supposed to and I don't know how she knows but she starts talking to that kid really mean and then turns to me and starts talking to me really nice and if you go to the US they would be talking to me really nice and then when something does something really bad they would talk to everyone in a bad temper but here they can switch from nice to angry.
I don't get why they don't have Spanish classes in the US because they should because they have English in different parts of the world like in the deserts or in Spain or in Italy they all learn English and they learn their language it is so cool except for I really think that in the USA they should have Spanish class.
On the first day of school, which was a Monday, I was really lucky because they were all nice and then on Friday there was this huge party and it was all day basically and it was a huge party with people showing off their cool costumes and you got to have hot chocolate and these cookie things. It was so fun. The party wasn't because we were coming, they have it every year and it just happened to be during the first week of school for us. It was called fiesta de Carnaval.

4. Tell me about kids here. 

Oh yeah. They are really nice. There are no bullies. I mean let's say there is a three year old, and a sixth grader who is like 13, and the three year old doesn't know what to do because the other 3 year olds won't let him play soccer then the sixth grader would play soccer with him - they don't care about how old you are they just play with everyone.  Like, if someone gets a goal while playing soccer and you are all sweaty you still give them a hug. And if you're friends with people you always give them hugs and put your arm around their shoulder and if you meet someone you don't know you give them a fake kiss by touching your cheeks together and doing the kissing sound. That's kind of weird. But I like the hugging part.

Doing homework on the bus.

5. What is it like not having a car?

I like it because if we don't have a car we actually save a lot more money because we got these passes so we can go on the metro and bus and that stuff except for every month we have to buy a ticket which is worth it because you don't have to keep buying tickets every time you get on the metro. So you put the card in this thing (reader) and you take it back out and put it back in the slot on your pass. Gas here costs like 7 Euros a gallon except they use litros. And there is a train that our passes work for.

6. Have you gone anywhere interesting? 

We were going to go to Salamanca for the weekend so we left school early and we immediately dropped our backpacks off and went to the metro.  And then we went on a train that stays under the ground until the end, got off the train and got on a big train to Salamanca fifteen minutes early to leave. The train was cool because to go from car to car we had to wave our hand at this thing so the door would slide open and then you walk through and we did that to go to the bathroom except you push a button to make the bathroom door slide open and then you push a button to shut it and then lock it and the bathroom is in the shape of a circle. And then while we were at Salamanca we stayed at our friends' house and there were two teenagers-it was the best because teenagers always have video games and watch TV so we got to do that and moms here they do ANYTHING for their kids and there are people who are like 40 years old and still live with their mom and so there mom got us stuff and it was like having a servant, basically. It was awesome.  The mom was named Maria and she was kind, she was so nice.  And one day we went to this park and I loved it, it was awesome. There was this zip-line thing and I played with a bunch of teenagers. And then it went by so fast because then after awhile we had to leave again and we went in a car to the bus station and the bus station didn't have security you just got on and showed the guy your ticket and then we left. It was a big bus except there weren't any bathrooms which really stunk but it was so much quicker like an hour and fifteen minutes quicker but I still liked the train better because it had bathrooms and plug-ins. But the bus had Internet. It didn't work, though.
We saw Laura and they gave us this huge things of snacks and this big bag of candy when we left; they were so nice!



7.  Do you want to talk about going to the Prado Museum?

We went to a museum yesterday. We got there at like 5 and we had until 8 and we walked around and saw these pictures which were so cool except for there was this one super, super, super creepy one.  There was this guy, Saturn, and he was eating his son's head.   The artist was Goya and he also painted rich people.   (He wants me to link to some images of his work: Goya)

8. Is there anything else you want to add to this? 

I like it here. In this city of Madrid there are over 6 million people and that is just the city and then if you go to my state at home there aren't even a million people and this is JUST ONE CITY! It is amazing. And that's it, folks, good-bye folks, and make sure you tell your friends.  Ha-ha.