Pobre David....

Pobre Pobre David...he really has no luck, there I was thinking he was getting on well with Mariana, the girl next door, when she goes and chucks him! And to make things worse, she didn´t just chuck him, she was the catalyst for a great deal of bank related distress, involving a a shouting security guard, an unintentional robbery, a handful of ´chest´and a swallowed bank card...as I said pobre David!

But at least this drama has stimulated Jimena to teach him how to go about doing simple errands (tramites) in BA. Actually, these may seem like ´simple errands´ but I can vouch for the fact that they are not so easy when they need to be carried out solely in Spanish!

Using the ATM (cajero) in Spanish is something I had to learn by the ´trail and error´method, which can not only be ineffective at times, but also quite risky, as with, only one bank card in my posession,I did not want to lose it! So the fact that Bueno, entonces... teaches the vocabulary for carrying out an ATM transaction is another example of how it teached practical Spanish as well as the usual verbs and adjectives. Words like ´pagar´(pay) and ´cobrar´can look very off-putting when you are starting at the blue screen of a big grey machine that is holding all the money you posess in the world to ransom!

Another practical lesson, that has been mentioned before in Bueno, entonces... is the lesson of posession of ´monedas´ (coins) ie. ALWAYS have them, because there are not enough and you cannot ride a bus in BA without them. On my arrival in BA I soon discovered this, and, one night when I had no other way to get home other than the bus, a friend gave me the coins and I tried to thrust a crumpled 2 pesos note into her hand, but she refused, saying monedas are considered to be a gift here, and I must take them as such.

Aside from the vocabulary of tramites, this class covered something which I am quite sure how to name, but was basically the vocabulary of doing something NOW...meaning speaking wtih the verb + gerund (I love that word). For example, ´Como´ (eating becomes´comiendo´(I am eating NOW), so simple by adding ´ando´, ´endo´ or ´iendo´ a verb changes into a anction that you are doing now. Once again, I am not a teacher so find such things very difficult to explain, but Jimea does it infinitely better than me! As usual, there are exceptions to the rule, but these do not seem toooo difficult either.

Discovery of the day: ´cola´ can mean not only that brown fizzy drink stuff, but also bottom....AND queue. great, more confusion!