Well it was 1 year ago that I left Scotland behind to make my journey around the world and I arrived in Spain.
As you may recall from my earlier posts, I decided to stay in Spain for 2 years to learn the language as I knew that it would be an invaluable asset on my journey around the globe.
So what has the 1st year of my journey been like?
First of all the old adage is true; the older you get, the quicker time passes. I cannot believe that it has been a year since I left Scotland. It feels like only a few months have passed. My Spanish is coming along nicely and is now at about the same level as my French, but as I thought, one year is not enough for me to become competent in the language. I have not mentioned this here before but one of my other passions is coaching American football and my plan to travel the world was always intertwined with my plan to coach this sport whenever I stopped travelling for a while.
I have found that no matter where I am, like most people, I need two things in my life. Something to do and people to socialise with. Now here I mean socialise in the broadest sense of the word, just meeting with and talking to people, whether it be about the weather or whatever else, is necessary for me just as it is for most people and coaching American football fills both of these needs. So I while I am living in Spain I have been coaching with a local team and it has been a great experience. The guys in the team are all good people and to be able to do this in such pleasant surroundings is a bonus. As a result I have not done much travelling and therefore I cannot yet populate this blog with tall tales of adventurous journeys or post spectacular photographs of beautiful vistas but I did visit the nearby city of Tarragona which has a lot of excavated Roman architecture.
Also at the end of the year the Repsol Honda Moto GP racing roadshow came to Reus and I got up close and personal with one of Marc Marquez’s race bikes. This awesome machine might look like a road bike but up close you can clearly see how different it is to the ones that the public can buy.
Occasionally I still make the mistake of watching the news from the UK on Sky and the BBC. I try not to but sometimes it’s hard not to.
As ever, I struggle to find any story that is not dominated by tales of the bigoted, homophobic, racist, and generally very bad indigenous people of the UK being incredibly nasty to those poor, defenceless, honest, and well deserving people who have swamped the country. Or I have to listen to some Social Justice Warrior twat pushing some politically correct agenda and telling all of the common people how bad they are to have any opinions that are contrary to theirs and how any freedom to express such contrary opinions should be criminalised.
Between that and listening to people wanting a second referendum on the decision by the British public to leave the EU dominating the other parts of the news, I struggle to find any unbiased information about what is going on in the UK or in the rest of Europe. I mean have the news media actually looked at what is happening in Europe? or does the information about the rise of the anti migration movements throughout Europe not somehow come to their attention? After watching for a few minutes I turn it off and I go to sit in the sun, and realise how fortunate that I am to have left all of this behind.
In saying that, there is the problem here in Spain about the Catalan government and it’s problems with the Spanish government but in all fairness, as in the UK, it is the media who seem to have their knickers in a twist about it rather than the majority of Spanish people that I know who seem rather ambivalent about the whole affair. In the city of Reus where I currently live I have seen only one public demonstration about it in my 1 year of living here.
As I previously said, I need something to do and people to interact with, and as the American football season here is about to end, I have decided to go to the city of Opole in Southern Poland to coach there for about 3 months. So if this year was anything to go by the next year should be even better.