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Made By Raffi
One of La Serpiente’s current favourite books is Made By Raffi, the story of a slight, quiet, longhaired boy who doesn’t like the rowdy activities of his classmates, and finds salvation in knitting scarves and making clothes.
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Late night Spanish and a side of stress
This evening I had a Spanish class that concentrated on past tenses, which provoked lots of talking, because we got to discuss historical events like the building of the Berlin Wall ("¿por que?" "¿como se dice ‘something for David Hasselhoff to stand on while singing City On Fire’?"), la guerra de las Malvinas, the invention […]
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Cheesed
I returned to work today after a four day break, to find I had ninety more unread emails than when I’d left on Thursday. If we assume that nobody was daft enough to send me emails at the weekend, that’s 45 emails every day, and if every email takes five minutes to respond to, then […]
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Meditation and Spanish practices
This evening I had a Spanish class which focused on non-verbal communication. I sometimes wonder if they’re swinging the lead; this wasn’t a lesson where they needed to focus on imparting lots of new vocabulary.
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Squashed in Singapore
Today I went to my Spanish class, where we mostly discussed illnesses. There was a listening exercise where various people went to a doctor, with ailments ranging from gastroenteritis to full-blown depression, and in each case the prescription seemed to be to drink some mineral water and have a few ibuprofen. So it’s good to […]
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Binomio
Tonight, instead of doing my Spanish homework, I fled the noise of the Chinese New Year celebrations (day 3 of 19) and went to Binomio, a Spanish restaurant on Craig Road. It’s a strange location. Over the road is a traditional shop house, next to a fenced-in football court, both loomed over by an enormous, […]
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Too early
Tonight I went to my Spanish class after work. My Spanish class starts on the 13th of January. I went home again.
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Spanish surprise in Singapore
I was taken aback at my Spanish class today, when a Frenchman expressed surprise that I was English and not Canadian, saying that I had no accent. After spending the last six years of my life being told that I had an accent and it was hard to understand, to find out now that I […]
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A series of hapless errors
Tonight I went to my first Spanish class for ages, and learnt the word "despistado" which either means"negligent", or "absent-minded", or "clueless", depending on how pejorative you want to be with your translation. In a room where I was the only British English speaker, it was disorienting to hear people state categorically that "clueless" was […]
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To be or not to be
There are two verbs that mean "to be" in Spanish: ser and estar. As described to me, one is essential and the other is contingent. That is, ser is for describing things that you always are: soy ingles, soy un hombre, and so on, whereas estar describes transient states of being: estoy cansado, estoy encima […]
