Plaça Jaume

Finally used the metro today, though I wasn’t brave enough to go alone.  I went with my friend, Jade, downtown to Plaça Jaume, because our teacher was having an art exhibition, and they promised (cheap) wine.  We got there early and ended waiting outside in thee plaza with a large group of protestors, chanting something about Tunisia and Algeria.  Not sure exactly what it was about, but we tried to stand aside, as the square was lined with cops.  It didn’t help that my friend, Jade, started talking about the corruption of South African cops and the intense security systems that they have in their houses (including panic buttons in multiple rooms!)—and then she told about a scam where “cops” i.e. men with fake sirens “pull you over” on quiet roads and steal your shit.  So, if you hear a siren and you’re on a deserted road, you just keep driving. Weird—and creepy?  Richard, who’s lived here for a year, then followed up with a wonderful story about himself. He was at the metro late at night and two men attempted to robb with a knife! Luckily, he was fine, he managed to step into an open café, but yikes.  DC’s starting to sound like a wonderful place!

Anyway, the exhibition. It was modern art, abstract actually, so I had no clue what was going on, I just looked at the things and tried to see stuff that wasn’t really there.  We wanted to search for our teacher’s hidden emotion, but I don't think we ever found it. But I must say that the evening was much improved with a bunch of us, mostly people from the school, hilariously trying to imitate each other’s and random other accents…southern accents, New York accent, Boston, Queen’s English, Cockney, Aussie, South African, and so on.  We were all varying degrees of terrible, which made the random, somewhat confusing art pieces that much better.

And then there was school itself.  I taught today, and it was considerably better than yesterday.  Yesterday I was nervous as hell, and it definitely showed.  I messed up a few times, I talked super fast, and even my lesson wasn’t that great.  But today I taught “elementary,” so everything was better.  They don't tell you your grade though, which kind of sticks.  It’s like a guessing game…

Annnd, we’re learning a lot of properties from both ling 101, and the History of the English language.  My teachers here are all very impressed that I know all the answers to the linguistics questions already, plus I keep inserting little anecdotes from linguistics, like child language acquisition, or how things have changed since OE/ME, even semantic shifts in words!  It is frustrating how they use some different symbols (rather than the c-wedge or the s-wedge), I guess it's the international one.  And the vowels trip me up, since the damn things are different with different accents, and we’ve got four or five different accents in our class!