Adventure, work and vibes

1) What do I do here?

I am currently living with my host Ina, as well as her 4 children, 4 dogs and 3 cats and my workaway colleague.

I work for 4-5 hours a day 5 days a week, making sure her children don’t end themselves. The gremlins in question are 11, 9, 6 years and 8 months old respectively and as you can imagine, there is a lot of chaos.

A day can look like this: taking the youngest from Ina at 6.30 so she can go to work, then waking the older children up for school at 7, feeding them breakfast and making sure they are at least marginally up to societies standarts (try to get a child to change clothes when they don’t want to. I dare you).

After that it’s actually getting them to school via bus and dropping them off at the building. Then getting back home.

All of that accompanied by a sometimes sleeping, sometimes very disgrunteled toddler. Good times.

Once I get back though, it is fairly relaxed and I just have to keep said toddler fed, engaged and/or sleeping until 11, when my colleague takes over.

Alternatively, on days where I have the afternoon shift, I get to sleep in, take the baby at 11, hopefully get it to sleep for an undetermined amount of time (what can I say, it is outside my control). Then I go pick up the kids from school, help whith whatever homework is needs it and then just… keep them from commiting fratricide until 15.30 (or 3.30 pm) most days.

Like… there are different flavour of this: some days we go to the playground, others I have to sheapherd them into their karate gear…

But essentially thats what you do on an “afternoon shift” as we have been calling it. We trade these every day, so neither of us workawayers gets too sleep deprived.

There is also the variation of Ina working a later shift, where all of the aforementioned happens 2 hours later in the day, but it is essentially the same thing with slightly less bus rides, since she can drop the children of by car. You know… like the real adult she is.

And in return for my, no doubt flawless, services (so far noone has been killed or maimed, I’m taking that as a win.)(As I should) I get a shared room with my fellow child-rearer, access to wifi, electricity, etc as well as food.

The later consist of a shared dinner that Ina cooks for everyone, as well as open access to the kitchen and all it contains, so we can make ourselves our own breakfasts and lunches to our own liking.

The only cavead is, that we need to tell Ina what needs to be restocked, which is honestly a win-win after the first akward message: we get the food we want and Ina has a functionally stocked fridge without having to double-check whats needed every time!

Yay for cooperation!

Honestly the biggest downside of this whole arrangement so far, is having a shared room, because that affords you basically 0 private space. That did cause some friction the first week, until we figured out how to co-exist as the rational adults we all pretend to be, by treating each other as business colleagues instead of being strangers that hang out like old friends.

All I will say on the matter is, that it was a growing experience.

The animals are only insofar my responsibility, that everyone needs to make sure they don’t run away, which makes them even more lovable housemates than they already were!

2) Ok, but what do I actually do?

Let’s be honest, most people wont care much about the minutia (ea? how do latin? Apparently it’s minutiae, would not have guessed that from pronounciation. It looks… so wrong)

Anyway.

Noone actually cares about the details of my work routine living on a very sunny island right next to the beach, unless they want to workaway here (In which case welcome! I hope you like chaos).

So let’s get to the fun part! What do I do to pass time when I’m off work?

Living the life is what I’m doing!

In all seriousness though this is not the most populated of touristic part of this already fairly unpopulated piece of land (70.4 people/km²) so there isnt much… to do honestly. It is definetly not party city, thats for sure.

I am also planning a whole post on things I do and might/will/could do so… for now all you need to know is that I’m having a great time doing them and it’s overall a very relaxing way of life here. (I reallz don\t wnat to write it twice. Patience please!)

3) Ok but how is it?

Amazing!

Fuerteventura has a really wierd topography that is slowly convincing me that evolution theory is wrong and humanity descended from some sort of reptile. I am having way too much fun on a barren, sun baked rock for any sort of sensible mammal to be blamed of my existence.

Altough I may have just solved my own theory. (This is a joke, please don’t deny me the right to a science degree because of underqualification and false recless concluding. I promise there are better reasons!)

Appart from that, I can really only complain that the water is to cold to really enjoy swimming yet, but to be fair I’m writing this at the beginning of march, whic is still very early in the year to go swimming at all, for a European country. It feels pretty nitpicky.

Honestly! Appart from that 0 complaints about this place! The sun is basically always shining, I get a lot of peace and quiet (whic does not currently look like a word. I should take a writing break) and beside that one week where hot dusty air from the Sahara was blowing across the ocean (not a typical occurence, I’vebeen assured) the temperature has stayed in my preferrred range of slightly above 25 with a refreshing breeze.

Also people are incredibly nice and welcoming. If they are not busy or in a hurry they are always up for a chat. Just a few hours ago a woman interrupted her own lunch because her dog barked at me when I walked past her camer van. And when I appologized and asked if I could pet him, she sat with me for about 20 minutes to talk about the dog, ask about my day and also introduce her other dog, which was incredibly cudly.

I will admit that it does help that I speak the language, but even tourists I talked to say that people here are very nice. Also a lot of people wont speak fluent english (or german for that matter) but they often know enough to help you out and/or sell you something.

It’s a great time.