Work hard, play hard....

Monday, August 25, 2008 - Sunday, August 31, 2008

This was the final week of my Oxford TEFL program, it was filled with finishing various projects, getting ready for our final exam, and assembling a portfolio of all the work that had been done throughout the course. It was an intense week of work, but still managed to squeeze in a little fun:) Oxford TEFL was even kind enough to put together a celebration with all of us student teachers, our tutors and the students that we taught, it was a nice way to end the program on a positive note.

With having completed the course, we were able to enjoy our weekend with another excursion, this time to a small town an hour outside of Barcelona called Vilafranca, where we enjoyed a tour of the small town and the Festa Major. In this festival, there were teams of people called "castellares" who build human towers. These people stand on each others’ shoulders to build towers up to 10 stories high, where a tiny little girl would scale up the people’s bodies to the top where they wave to the crowd and then slid down the “tower” of people. They all then scale back down, disassembling the human tower...it is quite amazing!!!

That evening was followed by checking out one of the final Magic Fountain shows of the summer in Plaza de Espana and then checking out the Sants festival, which was a smaller street festival as the Festival de Gracia, featuring a different bands in the plazas. Sunday was another excursion outside of the city to a small mountain town called Montserrat, where we toured a remote monastery and hiked through the mountain in a thunder and lightening storm…it was pretty awesome!