Sarah la Viajera
Sarah la Viajera

Auxiliar de Conversación Program

Bienvenidos! I participated in the North American Language Assistant Program from 2014-2017 in the regions of Galicia and Madrid, Spain. I taught students ages 3-12 and learned so much about teaching and living in Spain during that time frame.

Now I work as a freelancer in Madrid with her own service-based business that is primarily focused on translating, writing, teaching, and consulting. In the coming months, I will be adding lots more content here about applying to the program, packing and preparing for your time here, applying for the student visa and later on, after you’ve landed: getting your temporary residency card, applying for an autorizacion de regreso if you want to travel home for Christmas break or over the summer without your current student TIE card, what it’s like to teach at a school, reapplying for another year in the program, how to enjoy your life here to the fullest and more!

Keep checking back to this page as I update it quite often and add more posts related to auxiliar life and life after the program.

What are you waiting for? The unique world of teaching English in Spain is waiting for you! (Photo from my first year in A Coruña)

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A couple of weeks ago, I turned 3️⃣3️⃣ on December 16th. It’s long since been my favorite day but this year I made a couple of big realizations. As much as I’ve tried to have some sort of birthday dinner or a party when I was younger, I realize that since they haven’t usually worked out save for a handful of times (thanks, Christmas parties, trips and dinners 😅), I don’t really even expect to do something big. A nice, relaxed lunch (which is what we did this year) or dinner with @andrewrgillan, some self-care pampering and cake are all I could really ask for. Or a trip to Sevilla like I did a couple of times a few years ago. 😍🍊💗 Lastly, and this the big one, I think the reason why checking off a big item on my to-do list and marking the occasion are so important to me and why this time of year is more intense for me compared to everyone else, is that the year ends twice for me. First, once I add an extra candle to my cake and second, when the clock strikes 12 on December 31st. Much like it will here soon in the UK. 🇬🇧 It’s really crucial that as we get older, we keep learning more about ourselves and this year I dove deep. Parts of 32 sucked to be honest but other times I felt such joy and accomplishment for the things I’ve done and how I made it through this past year. This year, I’m grateful to be alive and 33 years old. Not everyone makes it this far and that’s a sobering thought. And in the same vein, not everyone who was with me when I was 32 can come with me on my glow up into this next year. Also, let’s not forget, this time last year I had no idea that I’d become a published author halfway through 2021. I can only dream up what I’ll do this year... 🤔😅 (Photos include birthday pics and some of my favorite things: cats, cute things and the gorgeous coastal views of Northern Ireland from this year 😍🌊🐈 ) Happy 2022 everyone! 🥳🥂
✨ 7 years in Spain as of September 27th, 2021 ✨ I honestly don’t know where the time has gone since I stepped off the plane in Madrid and then much later on, the bus in a brand new place at the time (A Coruña) but enjoy this flashback of photos from last summer when @andrewrgillan and I finally went back to #Galicia together in August 2020. One of my favorite photos from a pretty awful and chaotic year (2020👀) was taken on the beach in Matosinhos, Portugal (still on the Iberian Peninsula 😉) so I’ve thrown it in for good measure. Swipe til the end to go back to 2014. ¡Happy 7th Spainiversary to me y por muchos más! Please let this be a year where I can visit regions I’m familiar with and a couple I still need to see (País Vasco y Asturias or Canarias, I’m looking at you!) 🎉🇪🇸🥳💃🏻🥂🐙☀️🏝
Happy second anniversary, @andrewrgillan 🥳 I have to be honest these past two years have felt like double the amount of time has passed. Not that it’s difficult to be married to you, just that time has been thrown so out of wack. It speeds by in the blink of an eye and yet it still somehow manages to take its sweet time as the calendar pages painstakingly flip by. There aren’t enough words in the world to describe how I feel about you. 💕 But the second photo in this mini montage is the one I think describes where we’re at at this stage, two years in. We’re setting down roots. Not in a physical sense but where we are in terms of our love for one another. It runs deeper each day and not only have we hit our stride with sharing the same living space together, we complement each other better. I love waking up next to you each morning and laughing with you almost every night just before bed. You are the embodiment of what home feels like in a person. And I’m so glad that I got to experience more of what your home country feels like for you. 💝 From a chance meeting on a rainy night in Northern Spain to reconnecting through an awful situation five years ago next month to falling in love and building a relationship full of mutual trust and love together, day by day, I’m excited to see what this year will hold. #loveyouthemost #medianaranja 🍊 #internationallove
This time last week we were in Northern Ireland on our Gibraltar anniversary and traveling just a wee ways over to the location where we had had our wedding reception. While it was a special and fun day and our marriage legally began on Sept. 2nd, personally we had a few more weeks to go before our official married life. One of the most frustrating things of these last 19 months or so was having to stay put and when it was safe enough only travel locally (as in not leaving the Iberian Peninsula). I often thought of how couples who got married a few years ago or more have been able to go back to the places where they got married and have taken many more anniversary trips. And to think for us, simply having the ceremony and reception and bringing our two worlds together were miracles in and of themselves. It’s easy to fall into those ways of thinking and it is only human to do so. That nagging question of “well, when can we return to one of *our* special spots?” was answered last week when we were able to visit the lovely location where we had our wedding reception on 9/21/2019. The drive out to the forest, the gorgeous fields of dark purple heather (not to mention the sheep that held us up along the way 🐑🚗) and the forest itself were sights to behold. 😍 Stepping inside it and reveling in the greenery felt like I was taking a breath of the cleanest air I’ve breathed in in a very long time. 😌🍃 And don’t let my dress fool you, it was cold inside there too! As if someone had splashed a bucket of cold water on me. 🥶💦 It was a beautiful gift to both reflect on the memories of the past and make new ones at the same place, a couple years later. Swipe through for a few newer pictures from that day in Gibraltar. One of my favorites is the fourth photo because even then we were talking about the books I would write and smiling brightly thinking about the future. How wonderful to have gotten it forever frozen in time. ❤️ I could never have imagined what exactly we were embarking on back in September 2019 but there’s no doubt that I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else other than you, @andrewrgillan, by my side.💗 Happy belated “paperwork” day, mi amor. 💋👫💙💜
I am officially a published author! 🎉📖🥳 On the night of June 1st, I clicked publish on my first ever e-book, a massive 30,00 word, 121 page digital book that I have spent the last 7 months working hard to bring to completion. And it’s finally here! If you can believe it, I had to consolidate all the information I found but still came up with over 100 pages chock full of useful information, historical fun facts, descriptions, tips and links to all of the the transportation websites, articles, maps and much more. Not to mention pro-tips and recommendations you only learn from commuting around the city after almost 5 full years. There is something for everyone: first timers in Madrid, current residents, visitors and tourists, commuters, study abroad students, interns, languages assistants and travelers both young and young at heart. ❤️ But mostly it’s for the people who are or would be completely lost without a guide like this. To me personally, this book is for 21 year old study abroad Sarah who single handedly planned the longest metro trip from the Barajas Airport to the Atocha train station one wintry day in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio while reading her guide book. An actual paperback book with a map of the major metros of #Madrid and Barcelona. My goodness, how far she has come since January 2010. 😅 Madrid is a fantastic city with excellent modes of transportation, a city bike share system and buses that run on both electricity and zero emissions. There are still improvements to be made but I truly do love this city and how I wonderful and freeing it is knowing I don’t need a car to see it. Have you been to #Madrid before? What mode of transportation do you prefer? 🚇🚌🚊🚲 #madridmemata #ilovespain #newbook
Something you may not know about me is that I’ve never owned a car long-term. And what’s more is that I haven’t driven a car in almost 6 years now due to living abroad and not being able to make as many trips home as I would’ve liked to. It’s funny to me how half my lifetime ago at age 16 I was so dead set on getting my driver’s license before I got out of high school. But honestly, living in a suburb in southwestern Ohio, where was I really going to go? 🤔 It wasn’t until just last week that I finally pinpointed why I was so fixated on getting my driver’s license back then. It wasn’t because I wanted to drive somewhere on my own and eventually get my own car. It had more to do with what that license would’ve represented for me. Freedom. ✨ Freedom to explore the world around me. Freedom to go somewhere because I wanted to go there. Long story short, I did eventually get my driver’s license a few years later but I just never got my own car. The desire for one started to fade with time once I studied abroad in the South of Spain in 2010, saw how people here lived perfectly normal lives without cars and then I returned home and later to Jacksonville, where I was studying at the time. After using metro networks in Madrid, Sevilla 🇪🇸 and Lisbon 🇵🇹, I wasn’t so afraid of using the ones we had around the US. Most are far from being efficient but learning to navigate them helped build my self-confidence. So much more than driving as a teen and into my early adult years would’ve. This is the underlying inspiration for my upcoming book focused on Madrid’s transportation networks. I’ve written it not just for audiences of all types (tourists, language assistants, young professionals, interns, residents, etc) but for my younger self. If she could’ve known that the world was still as open to her then as it is now, my goodness, what adventures would she have had? #Madrid especially has shown me just how far and wide you can travel without a car and how you can still live just as full of a life. I will always be grateful to this city for that. Can’t wait to share this book and all my in-depth research with the world shortly! 🔜📖🌃🚇🚌🚈🚊🌍✨ #comingsoon
A little bit of hope can go a long way. ✨ One day, and I’m actually not sure exactly when, in my American Literature class my junior year of high school, a small yet powerful thought popped into my mind. “I want to write a book.” The words danced across my mind for a moment but the roots of that thought started to sprout and stay with me in the back of my mind during class that day and beyond. I don’t know what exactly sparked that thought but I do remember how we were studying Whitman and Thoreau that quarter. (Still can’t say for sure if one of their works inspired me or not) What I can finally say is that yes, I did it. I wrote a book. Past tense. We did it, 16 year old Sarah! 🥳 It only seems fitting that I finished the last bit of the text and design components today on April 29th, 8 years to the day I flew back to Europe on my first post-study abroad trip. 🎉 Little did I know then that this is what my life would look like now. And that that dream I dreamed of so long ago is almost a very tangible, real-life thing. I still remember back then thinking about how I wasn’t a very good writer and that several other classmates definitely wrote much better essays and stories than I did. I’m glad I didn’t believe those lies from the past. Or get crushed by my own self-inflicted pressure to write a book before age 30. Most of all, I’m glad I kept at it in terms of writing. That was one of the key factors to my success today. I may not have been the best writer as a teen but take that experience and add 16 more years of practice and you’ve got yourself an experienced writer (who actually refers to herself as so and embraces it fully) 💗 You don’t know how long it will take you to achieve a goal or a dream. Just know that the time will pass anyway but when you get there, the reward will be so sweet. 📚👩🏻🤓📝 (First 📸: roses in my neighborhood blooming on the wall of a school; second 📸: 24 year old me in front of a tram in Lisbon after 30 hours of travel in 2013. I loved that layover on the way to Sevilla. Two places I’d love to go visit right now 😍😭)
In the last year or so, I’ve learned a lot of lessons that have had a profound impact on how I view the world today. In the year and a half that we’ve been married (though it feels like so much more time has passed), I never could’ve imagined myself not wearing my engagement ring for most of this time. It started as keeping it safe while we were on lockdown and home all the time to keeping it safe from sticky hand sanitizer and my absentmindedness, not to mention that it’s a very delicate ring. It has certainly been strange but I am not as sad as I imagined I would be the day I tucked it away carefully into its box. In hindsight, both of us putting our rings away for safekeeping is a small sacrifice to make, though, we don’t know how long we’ll keep them off. What’s the deeper lesson you can draw from my experience? ✨ I hadn’t actually stumbled upon what I’m going to share until about a week ago. The realization is that we don’t *actually* need external reminders of who we’re with and the commitments we make. How many movies or shows have we seen where one of the characters takes off their wedding ring and acts completely different around an attractive person? As I think I said last summer, ring or no ring, nothing has changed in my heart for how I feel about mi marido, @andrewrgillan, and the commitment we made to one another. I get that taking your ring off for some unknown period of time would devastate some women (thanks societal pressure) but it’s truly not the end of the world if you are remaining with your partner while it’s off. What if one day you break your hand or fingers? The more important lesson I have learned is to ask yourself (if you’re married) “how will you act on a daily basis around all types of people if you had to take your ring off for x time?” 🤔 It’s been a lesson about another side to integrity that I hadn’t even considered. (Photos from 2017: 1-Sitting in Puerta del Sol in the exact same spot we’d get engaged the following year, 2-the pier (muelle) walk one night in Huelva where everything changed for us and 3-strolling on the beach in Málaga with my engagement ring for the first time ever, a few days before Gibraltar)
On February 29th, 2020, we took what would be our very last day trip for a while and what would become the very last day I’d wear makeup in 2020. I had run out of liquid foundation that same day and spent the next two weeks not even wearing makeup. It wasn’t until Spain went into lockdown for what would be 15 days at that point (turned out to be a total of 50 straight days with no exercise privileges) that I consciously decided to not wear makeup. I didn’t see a point since I didn’t have any Zoom meetings to attend or a husband to re-impress (he prefers me without makeup anyway). And you know what? I’ve spent just over the last year not wearing an ounce of makeup. 😮💅🏻 ✨ I haven’t painted my fingernails since we got married. Haven’t worn lipstick 💄 since our wedding day either. The list goes on... How does it feel? I feel freer than I ever have in my life. I have sort of defaulted back to my early teen years when I wasn’t even into makeup, reading books, letting my imagination run wild and being my truest self. It has been the most refreshing feeling in the world and while I don’t know if I will fully return to it, I will savor how confident and free ditching makeup has made me feel. If I could go back in time and encourage myself to not conform to some of the lies society tries to shove down our throats as women (fast fashion, full faces and seeing who can have more flawless skin), I’d go back to when I was 23 and getting eyeliner put on at a friend’s wedding. While most girls had been applying that since they were like 15 or 16, I had not been and my eyes twitched like crazy. At the time I thought something was wrong with me, that I missed learning something so crucial to being a woman: knowing how to apply her own makeup. It turns out that doesn’t really matter in the long run and this past year I have been reminded what does: washing your face, applying moisturizer and sunscreen, night cream (hey, early 30s, sup?) and exfoliating to name a few. These are things I’ve already been doing for a few years but with consistent work since last spring, I’ve really noticed a new shine and glow on my face. Do you think you could last as long as I have? 🤔