Chaperones Gone Wild: A Day at the Bay

A visit to a Very English City, where my students may or may not have practiced their English. I have no idea because none of us were supervising them.

Five English teachers, two buses and 78 high school students went on a field trip last week.

We were to leave at 8:00 for Benidorm, a coastal city about an hour from where I work. It’s got white sandy beaches and sort of ugly skyscrapers. The reason it was of interest to our English class is that Benidorm is stuffed to the gills with British expats.

“It’s basically like Chinatown,” I texted my friend, with no real idea what I was talking about. My point was that so many of Benidorm’s residents are British that a lot of the city operates in English, or at least that’s what I had heard.

The students’ task was to complete an alphabet scavenger hunt. Like, U was to find a Union Jack and take a picture of it. My two favorites were

• W: Waffle. take a picture of it.

• Z: Zombie. Convince a young foreigner to play a zombie with you and take a picture of this moment.

They also had to find an interview a British person, which sounded like great fun.

The Castle Viewpoint at Benidorm (I think some of those people are our students, taking a picture for the scavenger hunt.)

My coworker had told me the buses were leaving at 8, and I showed up a few minutes before that.

At 7:57, there is no bus in sight, and, for that matter, no other English teachers. Did they…. leave without me?

In my heart of hearts, I knew this wasn’t true. I don’t want to overgeneralize, but I’m going to go ahead and say that many Spaniards are not big into things like “arriving on time.”¹ Things are laid back. They will happen when they happen, whether it’s a meal or a field trip bus or a visa approval. No big!!!

Turns out the buses were actually scheduled to leave at 8:45. Which, of course, meant they arrived at 9:00 and, after wrangling dozens of teenagers onto two buses, we were on the road at around 9:30.

I knew the students would be divided into groups for their scavenger hunt, but I wasn’t sure how big the groups were, or how many there were, or how many I would be working with. I asked my coworker and she sort of laughed. Once we got to Benidorm, she said, we would just set the kids loose and tell them to be back for the bus at 1:45. Meanwhile, we’d just go explore the city.

This was incredible news for several reasons

1. Probably the most obvious, but I was just going to explore a Spanish city for the day with no responsibilities? Instead of working? Fabulous

2. I can’t imagine a field trip being run like this in the U.S. In the U.S., I don’t even remember being let loose in, like, a zoo. Let alone an entire city. Back in my country, kids had to sneak away from their chaperones, not just be set free from them from the start².

3. What was the point of all five of us coming? There were so many students in other grades who weren’t getting English classes the day because we were all on this field trip. And on the field trip we were just… hangin’ out. The epitome of the Spanish Way. Love it.

We’d been off the bus for about 15 seconds when the head of the English Department announced that she was ready to sit down and have a coffee overlooking the water. We deserved it.

The students scattered to go complete their tasks while we ate toast and coffee. One of the teachers, a man named Ricardo³, who once spent a few weeks in Frankfurt, Kentucky as part of his English teacher training, ordered a full English breakfast, which was comically big. There were two eggs, sunny side up ("TWO EGGS?" one of the other teachers said incredulously, because Spanish people don’t really eat eggs for breakfast), a little cup of beans, a slice of tomato, and 17 different kinds of meat. When in Benidorm.

Then we walked down the promenade chatting. This street, the Head of the English Department told me, “is called, vulgarly, “Calle de Coños”

Calle means street, but I didn’t know the word coño.

“Coño is something you say to people when you see them in the street,” she explained. ”Like, if you see someone you recognize while you’re out in town, you might say, ‘Ayyy, coño!’ And because this street is so busy, the joke is that you are always running into people you know. So, ‘Calle de Coños.’ But the word coño also means something else, so be careful using it. It means, like… well, like your private parts.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It means pussy,” Ricardo said helpfully. Leave it to the guy who is bold enough to order a Full English Breakfast while everyone else has toast.

It was a day of sunshine and walking and dawdling. Standing on the shore of the Mediterranean, across the world from where I’d grown up, I felt very aware of all the individual worlds around me. Do you know what I mean? Just that everyone has a whole life, full of plans and love and pain and joy. These are everywhere, of course, and I was surrounded by them in the United States too. But I think in some ways, I’ve noticed these other worlds more since I’ve been abroad. Maybe because they are more distinct – their worlds overlap less with mine, so I can see them more clearly. Or maybe it’s because I have to work a little harder to seek connection here if I want it. So I am always asking questions and getting these little snippets and snapshots of people’s lives.

I got to watch the female teachers, who had worked with Ricardo for many years, give him advice when he wanted to buy a piece of clothing for his girlfriend. I saw a teacher named Lucia buy a little phone mount for her son, so he can film videos of himself while he rides his bike. We run into a group of students and a teacher called Isabel makes a joke to one of the boys, who is dating a student in the grade below him, about how there were many so many beautiful women in Benidorm. The boy shrugged and told her he didn’t see them.

Now I know all these little things about people I don’t even know, like Ricardo’s girlfriend and Lucia’s son and the student’s girlfriend. Not wrapped up in their lives, just passing by, like seeing a house from a highway or a train.

On the way back, the Head of the English department picked a bar for us to stop at. It was called “American Bar” and the walls were decorated with things like American license plates, photos of American dollars, and a glowing Jim Beam light shaped like a guitar. Also, a Route 66 sign. Spaniards love Route 66.  

We had beers and I thought about how the students could be having beers right now too, and we’d have no idea. Some of them probably were. On the bus, Ricardo explicitly told them not to consume any explicit substances during the field trip, but no consequences were mentioned on by him, and no promises were made by the students.

We were late to the bus meeting point, but only by about two minutes. By Spain standards, we were early.  As the teachers counted and recounted heads and began  directing students onto the buses, late groups of students kept trickling in. I watched one student walk up with a full burger King Meal and then eat it, as fast as he could, standing on the sidewalk outside the bus. It did not look enjoyable. Then, he left his trash on the side of the road and a teacher told him to go pick it up. He did, but when she wasn’t looking, he just dropped it onto another part of the sidewalk.

“No!” I told him, like he was a dog, because he was acting like an animal, and picked up the trash and threw it away.

It was a long, hard day’s work picking up two pieces of trash after I walked around and took photos and drank coffee and had a beer. But what can I say? I do it because I care, and because I’m a dedicated employee.

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Question of the Week: Happy Easter tomorrow to all who celebrate! What are you doing to celebrate? What did your family do when you were growing up?

Recommendation of the Week: Everyone here is talking about Ana Obregon, a 68-year-old actress Spanish who recently had a baby via a surrogate in Miami. The sperm came from her dead son, so biologically, the baby is her granddaughter. It’s even more controversial here in Spain because surrogacy is illegal. I had no idea. Catch up on the drama.

Thanks for reading!

1. It might be Europeans in general. We have a friend from France who lived in the U.S. with his parents for a few years when he was a child. Once, his parents invited some Americans over for dinner at 7:00, which, in French means you are invited for dinner at, like, 8:30. When their guests arrived at 7:00, his parents were 100% unprepared. His mom was literally in the shower.

2. I was a boring teenager and did not actually do this. Plus, my mom always volunteered to chaperone trips, and she wasn’t about to lose track of me.

3. names changed bc that just seemed like the right thing to do? idk