glamoroso me

Most people may not consider teaching to be a glamorous job. However, that's only because they've never seen how I do it.

I mean sure - tantrums are frequent, you have to hold your pee all day, occasionally you come home with chalk dust on your ass and sometimes there's vomit, but we don't ALL wear holiday sweaters adorned with giant plastic pins, and if you play your cards right you can swing yourself some pretty sweet swag. Case in point: my job is sending me to Spain next week. That's right doctors and lawyers and professory types - Spain. To visit. For free. And all I have to do is make sure a handful of kids board the right plane, don't come home pregnant, answer their wake up calls, and don't get gored by bulls. (Wearing a holiday sweater while I do all this is, of course, optional.)

So, in the spirit of my upcoming intercontinental adventure, I've been trying to brush up on my Spanish. I originally had this grand plan to get myself some instructional CDs that I could listen to on the commute to work, but then I remembered that this is 2009. If robots don't do it for us then there's an app that will, so actually learning a language has become a bit...passé. So I searched around for a few minutes and, sure enough, there was an application available to download onto my phone that would not only translate useful words and phrases, it would even say them for me. I know, right?! Sweet Jesus, Hallelujah! Here I've been so busy dreaming of a day when I could somehow avoid all direct communication with strangers that I had failed to recognize that day when it finally arrived. Hello, brave new world!

Now, truthfully, the system isn't perfect. There's a very limited number of words and phrases that my phone will say for me, however, it will say "hello," "goodbye," and "I'm sorry" for me, so what else does a socially awkward English-speaking girl really need?

Well, after consulting the app's "Travel Safety" list, it appears that the creators of this particular application feel that an English-speaking girl traveling in sunny Spain also needs to be able to say:

Doctor

Hospital

Police

Don't shoot!

Stop thief!

and best of all:

Those drugs aren't mine!

Yep, it's a glamorous place I'm headed to for my glamorous job. Better pack my nicest holiday sweater.