 | Tamar attempts to learn Spanish! | |
| Tamar attempts to learn Spanish! | |
So while Tristan plays at being house husband and fiddles a lot with his computer, I am slaving away trying to learn Spanish. I am studying at the Instituto Cultural which is a lovely old colonial building with a huge garden. In the mornings I have a three hour grammar class with my teacher Betty, and 2 other students, Simone and Laura from Switzerland and Canada respectively - a very international group! The teaching is very good and everything is taught in Spanish so that we are hearing the language all day long! After 3 hours of grammar we have a conversation class for 1 hour which involves either discussing an article or playing a game like scrabble - again all in Spanish! By this time I am ready for lunch!
The afternoon is a bit more fun! We have a 2 hour cultural class. The first 2 weeks I took an excellent ceramics class taught by a very nice local Oaxaqueña woman called Ene who lives in a small pueblo nearby. We were taught (again totally in Spanish) how to make different types of pots from a natural clay that comes from mines nearby. Then we put them in a barbecue like kiln making sure that it was stoked for the 1 hour and 30 minutes that it took to fire. The finished things are then painted or left natural and look better in real-life then they do here - honestly!
Now I am taking a cooking class with Soledad which is also fun. So far we have made tortillas, frijoles (refried beans to you), mole and tamales (in this case, maize, chicken and mole wrapped in banana leaf parcels). The process of making mole is very complicated and involves lots of chilis, spices, nuts, chicken and of course chocolate. Oaxaca is famous for its 7 different types of mole although Tristan and I are yet to be convinced that chocolate and chicken should really be joined together in such a weird way!
Finally after all this we then have a 1 hour conversation with a local Mexican half in Spanish, half in English. My intercambio is called Cesar and he is a newly graduated lawyer here in Oaxaca. He is very nice but after a whole day of speaking and listening to Spanish it is quite good when we can speak a little bit English!
So this is my day. It has been a very good experience and I have met loads of great people and have learnt lots. I am a little scared about re-joining the big world as although it has been very intensive, it has only been 4 weeks! But hey I'm excellent in restaurant situations!!
Tamar, October 2000.
P.S. This is my first HTML page - Tristan is very proud!!
