The end of Week One ….

… and the big question is, will I survive Week Two?  It’s fair to say that I’m tireder than I’ve been in a very long time.  I’m looking after myself, though, taking a good two hours for lunch after morning classes. 

The idea is to give me little chance to talk English, so I spend lots of time rehearsing Spanish conversations in my head. They’re brilliant. I astonish myself with my lucid command of the language.  Unfortunately, when the moment comes for me to deliver my deathless prose to a real live Spaniard, those carefully honed phrases quite disappear and I’m stuttering and pointing as usual.

Seriously though, my comprehension has increased hugely, and I can have a reasonable chat with my hostess about my day. I decided to reward myself today with a trip to the beach. 

Mindful of this week’s WordPress photo challenge, which I’ll publish my contribution for tomorrow as usual, I shot a couple of experimental photos, by looking at the sea and sand reflected in the plate glass windows of nearby buildings.  Here’s one. And above, another much more usual I-do-like-to-be-beside-the-seaside shot.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/experimental/

Whether the weather be hot…..

I don’t expect any sympathy for this post. I’m sitting around in a t-shirt in a Spanish square, with a clara and a snack.  It’s 20 degrees, sunny, bright.

So why should you care that when I get up in the morning it’s a mere 4 degrees, and hardly better as I set off for school? Why should you be bothered that I never thought to pack any gloves? Why should you mind about the biting winds that whistle round street corners when the sun isn’t around?

This is a café at 9.00 in the morning. Everyone is inside, nursing a hot drink. It makes the mid-day sun seem even brighter.

Learning to embrace mañana

Woohoo hoo. I’ve been moved up a class. The thing is, I was a move or two ahead of my fellow student. In my new class, I’m two weeks behind. Better that way. Our teacher forces us to dig about till we find a way to express ourselves. I found myself casting about for a way to describe the plot of Colm Tóibin’s ‘Brooklyn’. However did I – sort of – do it? With some help from a fellow student is how. But I’m shattered, truly shattered.

The way forward is to have a long lazy drink and a bit of lunch in a friendly little bar I’ve found in a rather down-at-heel (for ‘down-at-heel’ read ‘picturesque’) square. 

Back to school to do my homework, then maybe a bit of culture. I’m not really capable of giving any museum my best shot at the moment, but it was still good today to mooch round the Baroque sumptuousness of the National Museum of Ceramics and Art, once the palace of the Marqués de Dos Aguas, and still recognisable as an aristocratic home.

Home to Carmen’s flat. A chat, TV, a meal. That’s it really. Nights on the town need not apply. Exhausted. But in a good way. And I’m beginning to learn that less is more.  Mañana.

Sunset over Plaza del Ayuntamiento.

Spanish as she is spoke

Today, it began, this business of speaking Spanish. Except that in fact it began last night.

Back in England, Malcolm and I had decided it was pointless to go and study together. We’d only go talking to one another. In English.

So here I am, in Valencia, the paying guest of a delightful Spanish woman who speaks no English. We exchanged a lot of information last night despite the language barriers. We know all about each other’s families, and I know about the parrot next door too.

And today the classes started. My only fellow student is an 18 year old from Beirut. He has eight months to get it right. I have a fortnight. But we devised quizzes, inviting each other to guess where we were born, enquired tenderly after each other’s health, and confessed how old we are, all in Spanish. Not bad for day one.

After three hours of all that, I cleared my head with a walk. Here’s the National Museum of Ceramics, closed today. I’ll be there before the week’s out.

Spain again

Hola! Here I am in Spain. No, not on holiday. No, not to see Emily, though I will squeeze in a quick visit to her at the end.

I’m here to learn Spanish – in a fortnight’s intensive learning. Watch this space.

I’ve landed in Alicante, because I can’t fly directly to my destination of Valencia. With an hour and a half to kill before my onward journey, here’s what I did. A quick boat trip round the harbour.

Snapshot Saturday: a transient house in a temporary home.

If you go to London, and if you go to the Victoria and Albert Museum some time before next February, don’t miss a rather special temporary exhibition I saw there this week.

Find the glass lift, and allow it to sweep you upwards to the sixth floor.  Here, from this light and airy vantage point, you can enjoy views over the museum and beyond.

Contemporary Korean ceramics.  That’s what you’re looking for.  There are glossy ceramic tiles, reinterpreting Korea’s exquisite porcelain from the Joseon dynasty (you can see examples of these down on the first floor).  There are wonderfully lustrous translucent vases, in luminous reds, yellows and blues.  Oh wait ….  they’re carved from soap.

But what drew me back, several times, was this house.

Here’s what its creator Kim Juree has to say about this, and the many houses she has created in the same idiom.

So what you’ll see if you visit won’t be what I saw.  Don’t wait too long.  This temporary structure isn’t long for this world.

If you peer behind the house, you’ll see a few of those vases carved from soap.

This post is a response to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge: temporary

Snapshot Saturday: a peek at a peak

This bulky cliff of long thin fang-like rocks that we could see last week from our Black Forest hotel while on our European Escape piqued our interest.  So on our last afternoon, while Malcolm was having a rest, I set off to explore.

I had only the most basic of maps: but this is Germany, land of the Walker’s Waymark.  Once I knew I was off to Falkenstein, there was no problem.  I yomped up to the woods outside town, turned right, and set forth.

I even tried to get a little lost, but however hard I tried, I was never far from a reassuring sign pointing me onwards to my chosen destination.

Once there, I found I couldn’t have more than a peek at a time.  That solid mass of rock visible from our hotel was never once in full view.  Instead, one, two, possibly three peaks at a time pointed skyward from my path below.  Here they are.

This post is in response to this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge: Peek.

EU, we love you

Strasbourg, focus of Franco-German emnity since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, changed hands four times between then and the end of WWII. It seems fitting that this city, the focus of so much strife and discord, should now be a seat of the European Union, a body which for all its differences seeks to foster cooperation and work towards mutually agreed policies.
After a too-brief visit to Strasbourg itself (and we’ll be back – what a city), there we were, at the vast complex of the EU Parliament. It offers employment to armies of staff who support the 751 MEPs from the now 28 member states. You need someone who can offer simultaneous translation from Polish to Greek, or Hungarian to Portuguese? Best look here.

This is a truly vast community, with meeting rooms, TV studios, offices, coffee shops, technical support, IT suites: all staffed by the most cosmopolitan bunch of people you could ever hope to meet.

We had a background lecture, and a rather exciting 360 degree film. We had a meeting with our own hard-working and committed Europhile MEPs Linda MacAvan and Richard Corbett.

And then we went into the Parliamentary Chamber. The debate was about immigration, the contributors from every corner of the EU, and almost every language (those simultaneous translators in their glass-walled studios were kept busy). Views expressed ranged from the near-fascist, to the liberal, moderate and inclusive. Nigel Farage wasn’t there. Funny, that.

From the film show.

And I left feeling more wretched than I have since the dreadful morning when we woke up to hear that the UK – by the smallest of margins – had voted to leave the EU.

It’s by no means perfect, but here in the EU we have a body fostering almost Europe-wide cooperation rather than conflict, working towards common progressive employment, economic, environmental and human rights practices. And we plan to leave? What for?