Hi, I’m Jess, I study French and Spanish at NTU and I’m currently working as an Auxiliar de conversación in Huelva, Andalucía. Right, the last six weeks have been crazy. Now that I’ve settled in properly, I thought I’d use my first blog post to summarise the most important things that have happened so far.
- Packed my bags and moved to the south of Spain – After sorting out my accommodation, filling out loads of forms and attempting to keep my suitcase under 20kg (didn’t happen), I left for España. Huelva doesn’t have an airport so I flew to Sevilla and then took a bus from there. I spent the next few days unpacking and making my room cosy while getting to know my flatmates.
- Started my job as an English language assistant – I was ridiculously nervous to visit my school and meet all the teachers for the first time, but my coordinator put me at ease straight away. From the get go I could tell some of the students would be challenging, not only in terms of behaviour but also in terms of their level of English. Despite this, I love my job and over the last six weeks I have learnt so much about teaching already.
- Became friends with other language assistants – I was a bit worried about finding friends in Huelva just because it’s a very small city but I’ve been lucky enough to find some lovely people who have made living away from home SO much easier.
- Got my NIE – I’ll go into more detail about this process in my next post but getting my NIE sorted was quite stressful and I’m very thankful its now sorted.
- Opened a Spanish bank account – In order for the school to be able to pay me, I had to open a bank account. I definitely couldn’t have done this without one of the teachers coming with me, don’t get me wrong my Spanish is improving and understand a lot but, the accent in this area is VERY difficult to understand.
- Started going to Spanish language classes – We were offered free Spanish lessons from the official language school which are already so beneficial. We spend half the class having conversations with native speakers and the other class is a language/grammar session. Having only studied Spanish for two years, this is an absolute blessing.
- Began to plan my own lessons – Now that I’m settled in my school I have started to plan and teach my own lessons. Although the students need a lot of the work translated, I feel like they’re learning a lot from me.
That’s it for now, I think I’ll use the next few posts to talk about the trips I go on but also the British council programme, how to find accommodation and how to sort out your NIE (basically all the stressful stuff).
Jess's year abroad blog 