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What Block B was for
Thirteen lessons took Alex from Madrid to Santiago, through Galicia and Asturias, to Bilbao and San Sebastián — and grammatically from the present subjunctive to all three of them plus the conditional. The two things are connected, and this is a good point to say how. The south block dealt with what is: a city in June, a monument, a dish, an accent. Its grammar was the present subjunctive, which handles wanting, doubting and feeling about things that are actually in front of you. The north block dealt with what might be: whether to move, what you would do, what you wish you had done. That needs the imperfect subjunctive, the conditional and the pluperfect subjunctive, and it is not a coincidence that the lessons about deciding, advising and regretting are the ones carrying them. Grammar arrives when a situation requires it, which is the whole argument for building a course round an arc. What the north gives a learner beyond grammar is the correction Alex names. Spain is commonly imagined as dry, hot and southern, and roughly the top fifth of it is none of those things: green, wet, cool, Atlantic, and in four regions speaking another language first. A learner who has only been to Madrid and Andalusia has seen a real Spain and not the whole one, and the single most useful consequence is the one lesson 67 and 74 set up — that castellano is one of Spain's languages rather than simply the word for Spanish. Block C goes east and to the islands: Barcelona and Catalan, Valencia and paella, the Balearics out of season, the Canaries and their missing vosotros. The grammar goes with it — the passive and impersonal se properly at 80, relative pronouns at 82, the second half of por and para at 83, object pronoun combinations at 87 and reported speech at 88. Almost all of it is machinery for describing and reporting rather than for supposing, which is the next thing a B2 speaker needs.