Sunday, January 26, 2003

One thing I´m sure about is that the spanish sense of humour is absolutely identical to that of the Irish. There are times in my classes when my stomach hurts from laughing at their jokes and sarchasm. I pity my german students because the humour goes right over their heads and you can be sure that the spanish always play on this.

Sometimes the assimilation of foreign words into a language is a bad idea. These days there are flyers being handed out on the street for a tattoo parlour in the city centre. They have an ongoing promotion for tattooing at "Factory Prices". Perhaps things are different here and you actually do hop up on a conveyor belt for your tattoo. You would definitely look funny if you were going to get one on your ass ! Another odd one that is a bit more established over here is "Footing" which means To Jog. But I suppose we can´t talk. How we came up with the name "COLUMBUS" for the spanish explorer is beyond me, because in his own country the name is " CHRISTABEL COLON ".

I´ve started teaching in the ministry of defence in the morning time. I would enjoy it except for the fact that it takes me about twenty five minutes each morning to get through security. Maybe I´m picking up a Basque accent from my flatmates. It is a really cool location and the room I teach in looks down into the Bernabeu Stadium. It is amazing how discrete the stadium looks eventhough it has a capacity of something in the region of ninety five thousand. Oh and I get a free breakfast there aswell. Though it feels a bit intimidating eating with them because the only stars I would ever come close to getting on my uniform would be for mastering the "french fries station" at McDonalds.

I´m still getting to know the city. There are so many different parts to it. I have found some really cool places lately. My favourite is a really cool jazz cafe-bar. Because of the spawl of the social scene the metro forms an integral part of the spanish pub crawls. They need the metro seeing as they try to dance until 7am or later.

A guy tried to rob me on the street yesterday. When he demanded my money I didn´t understand him and after a minute he gave up and ran away. In retrospect I reckon that it must have been my rippling muscles and thundering voice that scared him off.

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