Listening Level : MID ¦ Water Sports 1

INFO : Stevie is from Hull, England. 

Study steps:
1) Listen to Stevie talking about Barcelona and his business and answer the questions below.
2) Listen again and check your answers
3) Check answers at the bottom of page
4) Listen again while you read the transcript.

Please ask any questions in the comments section and I will answer them for you asap!

COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS
1) How long have Kat and Stevie known each other?
2) What does he use to describe the differences between the UK and Spain?
3) What nationality of people did Stevie meet who made him want to come to Barcelona?
4) Where did Stevie stay for his first 6 months in Barcelona?
5) What are the three work options for British people who don’t speak Spanish?
6) What type of tour does his company offer
7) Do you have to be able to speak Spanish to do the tours?
8) How many different nationalities are there between the thirteen guides?
9) Who did Kat do the Kayaking tor with?
10) What four activities do they do on the tour?
11) What sea creatures did Kat see on the tour?
12) What word does Stevie use to describe a group of fish?
13) What is the effect on the fish of so many people on the beach and in the sea?

TRANSCRIPT

K – Kat      S – Stevie

K – Today we are going to be talking to Stevie. I met Stevie 8 years ago here in Barcelona and since then we have both set up our own businesses, they are very different businesses. Welcome to APC Languages Stevie.
S- Thanks Kat, happy to be here.
K- Well, happy to have you here! What first made you want to come to Barcelona?
S- Well, I guess the short answer is the colour Blue…and that means the sky. In England, the colour blue doesn’t really exist so much, the water is brown, the sky is very grey. But in reality, it was that I was living in New Zealand for a while, where the sky is very blue and, on the way, back from New Zealand I met a couple of Parisians in Asia who happened to have been living here for quite a long while and they invited me to come and visit them in Barcelona. So, I came, I slept on their sofa and six years later I left their sofa and 9 years later I’m still here!
K – Well, luckily for me. OK , tell me a little bit about your business Stevie and what made yu decide to start a business in Spain.
S – Well, for most English speaking people, especially when you don’t speak the.. speak Spanish, we don’t have too many options when we first arrive in Barcelona. We can teach English, of course, we can work in an Irish bar or we can work in Customer Service. And with my background in water sports, I didn’t feel as though being stuck inside was the right thing for me. So, I created a kayaking and snorkelling tour and it was the perfect way to take advantage of all the amazing things that Barcelona has to offer and I can still live my dream of being in Water Sports.
K – Well that’s fantastic… and where do you take your customers?
S- Well, we meet the customers in Barcelona then we use a bus and we take them all the way up to Sagaro, which is in the Costa Brava.
K – and are all the tours in English?
S – No, we have, the majority of our customers are English speaking, well… the second language could be English. But we have clients from all around the world, it’s a very multicultural tour. Our guides speak several languages between them. We have thirteen guides all together and that’s nine different nationalities within those.
K – Fantastic. Well you know that I am a big personal fan of your Kayak tor because it’s the …I did it for the third time last week, my brother came to visit, and we absolutely loved it. I loved it for the third time and him for the first of, I think many times of doing it. But for the people listening, can you tell what they could expect from a day on your kayaking tour?

S- yeah, it’s a nice mixture of adventure and relaxation. It’s a long day, about eight hours long but almost three hours of that are taken up with transportation. We spend about two and a half hours just kayaking around the different bays, exploring some small caves, jumping off rocks, we generally just splash around and have fun. It’s a Kayaking and snorkelling tour so we do get wet and we take a lot of photographs which we share with people and and it’s a god fun day to have outside the city.
K- Last week I saw some starfish and also a couple of sea cucumbers for first time in my life. What other kind of life do you see when you go out?
S- Yeah, there’s a lot of starfish and sea cucumbers all around the Spanish coast. Sometimes we are really lucky to see barracudas, which are kind of big schools of barracudas and also, well, most days, especially at this time of year we see a lot of Octopus as well but as it gets a bit busier in August and of course, there’s more people there, more holiday goers and a lot more people enjoying the beach and of course it scares the fish a little bit as well so we have to go to different places and go a bit further out.

ANSWERS: 

1) 8 years
2) Colours
3) French ( Parisians – from Paris)
4) slept on the Parisian’s sofa
5) Teach English, work in and Irish bar, customer services.
6) Kayaking and Snorkelling
7) No
8) Nine
9) Her brother
10) kayaking around the different bays, exploring some small caves, jumping off rocks, we generally just splash around and have fun
11) Starfish and sea cucumbers.
12) A school
13) It scares them.