Life in Cartagena

The one place that offers general Spanish for foreigners courses in Cartagena - the Fundación de Cartagena para la Enseñanza de la Lengua y la Cultura Española  - has an annoying habit of putting on its courses when we're working. Maggie has never managed to find a course that has fitted in with her timetable but, just once in three years of trying, I did. We're an unreliable lot though, we foreigners, and after a few months my course fizzled out through lack of numbers. Shame. The Fundación had organised something for this afternoon  - a sort of club for foreigners to get together and speak Spanish. We met at the language school and then headed off for a local bar, the one in the photo. About a dozen of us all told: Dutch, Irish and Brits as well as the two Spanish teachers. Not an Earth shattering experience but not bad at all and all for 2€ per person.

Here in Spain the language is cared for by a committee of the great and the good, the Royal Spanish Academy. Every now and then they publish a new dictionary or a new grammar. In reality though it doesn't matter much what the academics say because native speakers the World over are, as I delight in telling my students, the owners of their own language. So if my nephews want to describe a thing as sick, meaning that it is good, then so be it. Yesterday morning my Spanish class was a real headache; the teacher spent a couple of hours explaining the use of a verb structure to me that required not only a relatively complicated grammatical construction but also a philosophical understanding that was way beyond me. In the evening I went in to work for my evening teaching sessions. What had originally looked like a free hour was assigned, at the last minute, to a young woman who had asked for extra tuition in preperation for an English exam. Her grammar text book was in Spanish but it...

Last year we were thwarted in our attempts to find a Spanish class in Cartagena. This year there's nothing for Maggie because of her work pattern but, as I'm free on Monday morning, I've been able to get a place on a course run by a set-up called called Funcarele. I can't get to the session on Wednesday but something is much better than nothing. It was the first class this morning. Just six of us and a very pleasant young woman teacher called Rocio. I suppose they'll change my timetable at work now.

A while ago I put an advert on some Internet site advertising as an English teacher. After seeing the ad the owner of a language school contacted me by email saying that she was looking for someone who spoke good Spanish as well as English and did I fit the bill? I replied (in Spanish) saying that I was sorry but that my Spanish wasn't too hot. It was a very short message but, because I remembered to put an accent on a simple word, the langauge school owner came back and suggested I give her a ring. We spoke in English for a while then she said we should speak in Spanish. A few sentences into the conversation she said that my Spanish was OK. My response was "Pero hago demasiado errores" which is supposed to mean "But I make too many mistakes" - it's a direct translation from English. It's not what Spaniards would say, they would say "I commit too many mistakes" or "Cometo demasiados errores." And it's stuff like that which u...

As my regular readers know (thank you both, I hope you got your Christmas cards) it grieves me how poor my Spanish is after five years here. No matter how hard I try to learn vocabulary, decline verbs and jot down useful phrases I still fall apart when I have to speak Spanish. I have a couple of language exchanges, intercambios, each week. The idea is that we meet and we speak a bit of English and a bit of Spanish. One meeting is with a Spanish chap who takes his language learning very seriously, as an academic challenge. The other is with an Ecuadorian woman who has more practical reasons for wanting to learn English. Both of them do what every Spanish speaker does when I get going on this topic. They say my Spanish is good (but they have no answer as to why people screw up their faces in incomprehension when I try to buy a packet of fags) or that a few mistakes are all part of the fun. I say the same to them about their English - all jolly civilised. I can't agree though whe...

Youth and young seem to be pretty inclusive words in Spain. When the TV news talks about the difficulties facing young people buying a first home they are talking about anyone under 35 not just teenagers. That in mind I wasn't too concerned about going to the Espacio Joven - the Young Space - to ask about language exchanges. A couple of people had told me that the "youth place" people were the organisers of a language exchange programme. Espacio Joven was a busy office; there were lots of twenty somethings looking at notice boards full of information about jobs, flats to rent, courses and things for sale. I presume that Espacio Joven offers services and information to young people but it wasn't obvious what or how. I'm sure they will have an impenetrable website somewhere that explains it all in extremely long words! As usual there was absolutely no indication of where to go or who to talk to - no enquiries desk, no notices explaining what any of the 10 to 15 ...

The Official School of Languages. Not some back street academy run by a pack of St Trinians types. No, the real thing, the official thing. They do lots of English courses and plenty of other languages but they don't do Spanish courses. It was one of the first places I checked when I started the hunt. Despite all the setbacks we are still looking for a Spanish course or, at least, some Spanish practice. I went to the Escuela Oficial today because a colleague of Maggie's had suggested that their noticeboard was loaded with people looking for intercambios, exchanges, half an hour of Spanish and half an hour of English over a beer a couple of times a week so that both sides get a bit of conversational exercise. As you can see from the snap the place was heaving with people. But, on the noticeboard, nobody, nothing; well I could have rented a flat or bought a car or got some translation work done but no inercambios. I left a little ad of my own. Fingers crossed.

We were in a bar yesterday. Part of  our research  into the local area you understand. It wasn't in the Showtime bar which was orange and chrome, nor was it in the Reserva, the one with the "Cigar Store Indian" but it was in the one with the life sized pirates. On the bar was a tattily photocopied leaflet headed "Free Education." One of the courses on offer was Spanish for Foreigners. The last day to sign up was today at anytime between 7 and 8.30 in the evening so we went and did it. It was a strange place where we signed up. An office in a block of flats with old looking furniture and outdated office equipment but with welcoming and friendly staff who dealt with us as though we had learning difficulties. Nonetheless they told us what the process was, made sure we knew where we were going etc. My guess is that it was some sort of local charity with Local Authority funding to provide grass roots, second chance, education in a run down area. I felt a bit of a f...

I may have started when I was younger but I distinctly remember making plans to avoid dancing classes at school when I was 7 years old. Over the years I have gone to great lengths to avoid dancing. I was told that dancing was the key to sex when I was a teenager so I went to a couple of discos but I hated them. I decided that I could do without sex if it involved dancing. I don't dance. People are always telling me that I should. They tell me how much fun it is, how I'll enjoy it when I get started. They're wrong. It isn't fun, it's humiliating and I don't enjoy it - I detest it, I hate it, I loathe it and I would quite happily hurt the fools who continue to pester me about why I should dance. Today I went back to the Adult Education Centre for the "presentation" about the Spanish for Foreigners course. There were a couple of hundred people in the hallway pushing and bumping into each other, I was dripping with sweat having walked there quickly, there ...

Years, nay centuries ago I worked in adult education - evening classes and what not. As part of the annual routine we would work hard from around April time to ensure that we had a full programme of courses to offer as September came around. We produced booklets with details of the courses, we advertised in the local newspapers, we updated websites and we did all we could to sell our courses. We tried hard to describe the course, where, when, what people might learn from it and what was expected of them. In fact both the students and the teachers used to get fed up with the amount of detail we asked for and supplied. Maggie and I want to do a Spanish course. We've done them before here in Spain but usually in small towns where a quick visit to the Town Hall or the library has turned up a leaflet which gives sufficient detail for us to know when and where the course is, how much it costs and how to sign up. In Cartagena, a city of 210,000 people it didn't prove so ea...