More working hours

A colleague of mine (whom I only know by mail) asked me to take some of her classes for a couple of week because she needed to go to England for personal reasons. I agreed and did so, no problem. Now she decided to give up most of her teaching hours and the boss-owner of the agency asked me if I'd like to take her classes up.
It was very sweet because she sent me an email with the proposal and when we meet after that to agree on the final time-tables she told me that my students reported that they're happy with me and my teaching and that she thinks that I'm very reliable and hard working so that she hoped that I could be able to take more hours on.
I'm pleased by the assessment as I do try my best with the teaching and to be on time and so on and is nice to have good feedback. I do believe that if you take a job you should be doing to the best of your abilities. I don't know how long I'm going to enjoy doing this job but while I'm doing it I'm doing it as well as I can.

Of course, the best thing about this is the increase in my monthly income which is going to more or less double. We can now plan to take a few days off for the holidays in August, which we'll take so it coincides with a conference that "the husband" is having in Arezzo, Italy. God knows I need a good rest, as this year was very tough on us all with all the changes and our economy was tight due to all the expenses we had.

As you know, my son's school is in another village nearby and he has to commute by bus for 45 minutes each way every day and stay for school dinner all due to the fact that we had to sign him into a school in April last year when we were still living in Bristol. Now I apply for a place for him at the school which is just one block away from the flat. I can actually see the school's side from my balcony as it's just a stone's throw away from our flat.
It took me 2 days to collect all the certificates and what-have-you that they needed in order to allow any child to apply for a place at the school and i still have to ask our GP back in Bristol for the vaccination records. Bureaucracy here is the worst ever and the one thing that bothers me the most. And even after I show them most of them and because we're not locals we're a square peg trying to fix into a round hole and there's always something that doesn't fit, so I have to write a letter explaining that we're foreigners and our papers may not be exactly what they expect. For instance they want a copy of the libro de familia or family book where all things related to the family are written, this book is given to all couples when they marry so we cannot possibly have one since we married elsewhere and P was born in another different country. Our marriage certificate is in one language, the birth certificate in another and the latest school certificate in a third! (Spanish, English and Catalan)
I've no much of a problem with all this as I'm able to write a letter in lovely formal Spanish and then I can go to the school and sweet talk them into whatever I want, so I managed to register my son and I've been told that the school has 2 places and no other applicants for year 6 so it's most likely that we'll have the place in our first choice of school (the one opposite to us). However, what other immigrant do when they have to deal with bureaucracy here is beyond my understanding, as here you don't have a choice of the applications and guidelines in any foreign languages other than Catalan or Spanish and you have to either have all the required papers and certificates or talk your way in.
Remember those reality tv programs about Brits trying to live and work abroad? Well, they do not exaggerate a bit! Living under the sun can be great fun until you have to face the bureaucrats.