When we arrived in September, a few days before my son had to start school, I worried about how he would fit into a new school environment, where he did not speak the language. Though he was not too concerned about it because moving to Barcelona for him meant he could attend the tennis academy he had been coming to for the last two years during school holidays, the day before starting school he experienced a little trepidation as he did not know what to expect. It only took one morning at school to see he was going to like it here. The kids in his class made him feel welcome from the start and the whole school experience here is very relaxed to say the least. The fact that there is a lot of outdoor time playing football helped settling in. Language turned out not to be a problem because Italian and Spanish are so similar that you can understand and make yourself understood very easily even if you are not fluent. I know children are sponges, but I cannot believe the speed at which they actually pick up a new language. Well, it is actually two languages because since 2009 schools in Catalunya have adopted Catalan as first language, but Spanish is still the language mostly spoken by the children. It is quite strange because the books are in Catalan but the majority of children tend to speak Spanish among themselves and to the teacher too. My son is definitely picking up Spanish faster, which is odd because most of the written homework is in Catalan. The fact that the two languages are very similar between them makes it even more confusing – at least it does to me – because I have difficulty in telling them apart. I soon realized that here in Spain the manana culture is embraced from a very young age. The schooling is a clear example. School hours are from 9 to 4.30, but the actual classroom time is from 9 to 12.30 (with half hour break in the middle) and from 3 to 4.30. Between 12.30 and 3 is siesta time, lunch and play if you stay at school or you can leave and go back at three. Naturally teachers have a long break too, so if you decide to leave your children in school between schooling hours you need to pay for the service and not just for lunch.