When Waves Attack

Yesterday was a perfect day of blue skies and warm temperatures, so I decided to take a trip to the beach.  I decided not to go to my local beach (an hour away by train) and double my travel time to go to San Sebastian, where I knew the water would be perfect for swimming.  When I got there I went first to a beach I had never been to, Zurriola, to see what it was like.  It was pretty but not ideal for swimming as there were decent-sized waves and a lot of surfers. Since I didn't feel like dealing with either one of those things, I went to the more well-known beach, La Concha.  Although it was mid-day and many people had left the beach to eat lunch, it was still relatively crowed. I stood on the boardwalk above the beach for several minutes looking for the perfect place of sand on which to lay my towel.  I was looking for a place relatively close to the water and and in line with one of the many floating platforms in bay so I would have the shortest distance to swim should I choose to swim to the center of the bay.

When I finally located my ideal location, I set my towel down and headed to the water, determined to swim to the floating platform.  I am a fairly decent swimmer, but the majority of my swimming experience has come from the pool, not the sea.  This combined with the fact that I hadn't done any swimming of any kind for at least several years made me rethink my decision and stay in the shallower water where I could, for the most part, keep my feet on the ground. Had I been with someone else, I may have swum out there, but as I was alone, I didn't want to have any problems and not be able to get back. I was happily content to play around in the water just deeper than where the majority of the waves were breaking.  I liked that place because I could still touch the bottom, but deep enough that I could float freely and didn't have to worry about being smacked upside the head by the breaking waves . Or so I thought.

The tide was coming in and there was a strong current in the shallow water.  I learned as a small child never to turn my back to the ocean, so I turned sideways in the water so I could see both the shore and the bay. Although, because of the current, I could usually feel before I could see that a larger wave was headed towards the shore. When I could tell that it was a big wave, I would prepare myself by to be ready to jump and let the wave carry me a short distance towards the shore so I wouldn't get pushed under.

When I looked towards the shore, I noticed there was a girl about my age that seemed to be watching me.  She eventually ventured into the deeper water and said hello.  I responded and she was pleasantly surprised to find that I spoke English.  We got to talking and I found out that she and her friend were on vacation from the States. I asked where she was from and she told me she was from Seattle as well. What a coincidence! She also told me that she was watching me because it seemed like I knew what I was doing with respect to not being pushed under by the waves.  As soon as she said this, I could feel the current pulling me towards the bay and turned to see one of the largest waves I had seen all day heading our way.  "What do I do?" she asked me. "Just jump and let it take you," I replied, having previously tried this strategy successfully and knowing that we neither had time to get closer to shore nor into deeper water to avoid the hit.

I jumped at what I thought was the right moment. Either the wave didn't break where I expected it to, or I mistimed my jump, or both, because the next thing I knew I was hit and pushed under by the wall of water.  My face smashed hard into the sand and my only thought was to stand up as quickly as possible. I stood up with pain in my nose, mouth and chin, only to hear my new acquaintance say, "Here comes another one!"  I turned and saw another wave coming at me. Though it wasn't as tall as the previous one, it had enough force to knock me down to my knees.  When I stood up again, I said I was done and headed back to my towel to survey the damage.  I had no idea what my face looked like, nor was I conscious of the fact that I was completely covered in sand; I just laid down on my towel and began to blow immense quantities of sand from my nose.  I must have looked like a complete mess because the woman on the next towel over kept looking at me strangely. Since there was no blood as far as I could tell,  I laid there for probably about 20 minutes trying to use the sun try to dry off a little and decide whether I should go try and find an ice pack.  As the tide was still rising and the high tide line was fewer than 10 feet away, I decided to pack up my things and leave.

I left and wandered about the city for an hour, killing time until the next train.  It wasn't until I got to the train station that I saw the damage.  I had a dime-sized red lump on my chin and a slight red circle around my mouth and nose as well as marks where I had bitten the inside of my lip, not to mention the copious amounts of sand in my ears and hair.  I am sure I brought about half of the beach home with me in just my hair. When I got home I tried to explain to my roommate what had happened and she kind of laughed at me.  It wasn't until later, when she noticed the bump on my chin that she gave me the you-really-are-a-dumb-American look and proceeded to tell my adventure to her friend. We all had a good laugh at the expense of the dumb American.

Word of the Day:
English - wave
Spanish - ola
Basque - olatu

Who is Mr. Bean?

Now that the beginning of the school year is upon us again, I am going to share a few of my stories and observations from the previous course.

If you have ever spent any length of time learning English in a classroom setting, you most likely are familiar with Mr. Bean.  However, if you are like me in that you have spent the majority of your life in the United States, you probably have no idea who I'm talking about.  The truth is, despite the fact that Mr. Bean is extremely well know in the world of second language teaching, I did not know who he was until a couple of months ago.  In case you, like I was, are unaware of who Mr. Bean is, he is a character played by Rowan Atkinson that stars in a series of short, nearly wordless episodes that are extremely useful in language teaching.

Several months ago some of my students, not terribly excited about what we had to do in class, asked if I would put on a film for them.  When I refused, they began to beg.  When I continued to refuse, one of the students suggested that we watch Mr. Bean, as it was something they had watched with other teachers in previous classes.  I stuck to my guns and continued to refuse to let them watch a film. "Besides," I told them, "I don't know who Mr. Bean is." The entire class fell silent, as if they were in a state of shock, until one girl said something to the effect of  "How can you not know who Mr. Bean is? You speak English!"  I then tried to explain that in the U.S. Mr. Bean wasn't as common as in England.  They still couldn't believe that I had never heard of him before.  The argument to watch an episode of Mr. Bean changed from "We want to watch it" to "You have to watch this to know who he is, and what better place to watch it than with us".  I told them I would look into it when I got home later that afternoon.  I was rather busy at the time and I forgot spend the few minutes looking him up on the internet. In fact, I didn't expect to ever think of Mr. Bean again.  That all changed when I went to Basque class a couple of months later.

That day in class, we were informed that we were going to watch an episode of Mr. Bean and then, later, recount the story.  "You all know who Mr. Bean is, right," the teacher asked us.   "Ez dakit nor den," I replied. "I don't know who that is."  Once again I had an entire class stare at me in disbelief that I didn't know who he was. The class couldn't believe it and the teacher gave a "really, you're an English speaker who teaches conversation classes and still don't know who he is" look. "But you're American, you have to know who he is," said one of the other students. "That's precisely why I don't have any clue as to who you're talking about," I wanted to say.  You see, I was at a great disadvantage as I hadn't had any exposure to Mr. Bean. For starters, I'm American, I have never studied English as a foreign language in a classroom, and I was the youngest person in the class. We watched the video and the teacher asked, which was in English with Chinese subtitles, and afterwards, the teacher asked if I knew who he was. I replied, "I do now."  So much for being an authority on all things English-related.