Well, this is a bit late, partially because I’ve been busy, but mostly because I’ve been lazy. 

Today I taught again, and once again, I was with Geoff ( a good thing too, cause he likes to draw smiles next to all his comments and tends to twist everything into a positive.) Anyways, one of the students asked me a question on the present perfect, and I had no idea! I kept thinking about a story they told about this one guy who didn’t know why the structure of the sentence was different, so he said it was because the statement was about outer space, and all the students believed that was the reason!  Yeahhhh, I didn’t want to be that guy. But we (me and the students) figured it out in the end.  And then Geoff told me that I was adaptive, that that came from working with kids, where the best laid schemes of mice and men just never work out.  So I guess that’s a good thing—I think it means I think well on my feet, and I’m good at quickly changing plans and going off in a different direction than my lesson plan says I will.  I never knew this about myself…

But anyway, what I’ve been meaning to write about is my landlady, Mariluz’s, party on Saturday.  I think it’d be classified as a dinner party (though I’ve rarely been invited to them so I don't really know).  She knew that I’d never had a Spanish tortilla (rather like a big omelet, but also cooked with potatoes), so she made one for one of the dishes for me, which I thought was so sweet!  She also made this kickass lasagna thing that was 10 times better than the traditional American variety.  It had fresh veggies, no meat or tomato sauce, and even the cheese was different.  I really need to ask for the recipes!  Plus, it was this one girl’ birthday, so that meant there was un pastel chocolate….yum ;)

And they kept pouring the wine!  As the night progressed (it didn’t even start until 9:30!), it got harder and harder to communicate.  They were all speaking Spanish (none of them knew much English besides Mariluz and one girl who’d had too much to drink to remember how to say much) and the night was getting pretty late, and then there was the several glasses of wine…. it’s safe to say that I didn’t get much.  

This one woman took a liking to me.  She was a Spanish teacher from Argentina, here only for a short time, but she sat down and started talking to me.  She wasn’t that good at English, and I wasn’t that good at Spanish, and neither one of us were that good at French, but we used all three to have a lopsided conversation.  She kept calling out to Mariluz to come translate for us, and the poor woman was getting all confused with the bustle of languages in her mind, until she started trying to talk Catalan with me, and we let her go sit down. But this woman (whose name I think I missed), she was a middle-aged lady with three sons. She spent a good portion of the evening trying to set me up with her youngest son.  She told me all about him, and why he’d be perfect for me…. He was tall, he had light hair, blue eyes, he spoke English, he studied at university, he was 24. Perfect!  She used that word an awful lot!  I never actually found out if he was here, or if he was in Argentina, so I guess I’ll never know. Oh well. 

The last guests finally left around 1:30, and then I pretty much collapsed into bed.  Four glasses of wine, lack of sleep, and the exhaustion of trying (and failing!) to speak and understand Spanish will do that to you!