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Really so glad I’m still here!
And that you guys are all still here with me.
A glass of bubbly … ?
4th blog anniversary
01 Saturday May 2010
Category Archives: friends
pain in the ash
19 Monday Apr 2010
Yes it is awesome and quite breathtakingly beautiful, but…
It has also screwed up the travel plans of thousands of people, including my friends Teuchter and her husband J, who should have arrived in Spain last Saturday. For months they’ve been planning their tour of Andalucía, which would’ve also included a couple of days in Sevilla. We’ve been emailing back and forth with different plans and ideas. It was all very exciting because the last time T&J were here was five years ago and we were so looking forward to getting together again. Bum.
Been following the stories on Twitter, of people who are either stranded elsewhere or stuck at home. It really is unprecidented and in a way quite fascinating. But what a mess.
Anyone you know get stuck or stranded?
punctuality
19 Friday Mar 2010
Posted in friends, language, psychology, work
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How important is punctuality to you?
I live in a country where you are still considered to be “on time” if you arrive up to 15 minutes after the appointed hour. To me that is late! But I try to go along with things like this and don’t let it bother me much … until it also starts happening in my working life. Because I do expect my students to show up on time (just like they expect me to be here waiting for them and prepared to give a class) and for the most part that works out. But yesterday was the third time my Spanish/English classes with María Paz went for a burton … and I just can’t function like that.
Twice she just didn’t show up (no call, no nuthin) and yesterday, after having asked me to move the class forward half an hour, she turned up twenty minutes late! And well, okay, not the end of the world or anything, and if it were just about getting together for lunch or to hang out it probably wouldn’t bother me [much!] … but I can’t *work* like that. And so the classes have now been postponed – probably indefinitely. On the other hand, María Paz is great for being spontaneous and coming out to the hospital with me at a moment’s notice. So we are trying to work out a way to keep seeing each other more often without any sort of rigid schedule.
But no classes. Just hanging out… well, maybe.
birthday boy
03 Wednesday Mar 2010
Posted in birthdays, food & drink, friends, restaurants, sevilla, tapas
Yesterday was Nog’s 57th birthday!
And this is what we did. Because this is what we do about birthdays here at casa az … celebrate the heck out of them! Had a wonderful lunch at La Azotea and then a pleasant evening at home watching films and snibbling cats.
You can see the food descriptions here…
La Azotea
my new spanish teacher!
25 Thursday Feb 2010
Posted in friends
This is María Paz.
You may remember that she dropped everything to come with me to the hospital on Monday after receiving a frantic last minute phone call from me when I found out Flor couldn’t make it. And so she was with me when I had the awful appointment with the oncologist and she was very supportive – at least I knew that I wasn’t just being oversensitive and that the insults were not imagined. Another positive thing that came out of that hospital visit was that I vowed I was not going to let Dr Ana get the better of me again in May simply because my Spanish is rusty and, especially when nervous, it takes me some time to put my thoughts and palabras together.
And so yesterday I called up María Paz and asked if she’d be interested in having English classes with me. She said she’d love to but it would depend on how much they’d cost. When I told her the cost would be an hour of her time once a week having Spanish conversation with me she was delighted. And so am I. The past couple of years I’ve barely spoken any Spanish, and I’ve always been better at understanding than speaking anyhow (those damn verbs!), which I realised on Monday was a situation I want and need to rectify.
We start today…
casa azahar 