Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

It’s typical of course. You book your holiday expecting glorious weather. When you arrive, it’s dreadful and it only gets better when you leave!

That’s exactly what’s happened to several groups of guests that we’ve had over the last week or so.

The only ones that have been doing OK are those that have been here for about a week now and still have several days before they leave. They arrived in the very worst weather that we’ve had for a long time now with a major storm on their first evening.

Still, now that a whole bunch of people are leaving, the weather looks like it’s getting back to the norm for this time of year ie lovely sunny days.

We usually have quite a mix of nationalities and particularly so when we’re full yet we’ve been completely full for a few days now and everyone is from the UK.

You might think that’s very peculiar in that there isn’t any UK holiday on at the moment. Where are the French for instance? Well, the French don’t come very much outside their main holiday season which generally means that we wouldn’t expect to get the next French guest ’til we get into October.

Quite where everyone else is, I don’t know.

That’s a common question from our guests lately.

Why would be speak French though? He’s only three so he doesn’t go to school yet and therefore doesn’t hear much French. Yes, he was born in France and so he is Frecnh but that doesn’t mean that he popped out speaking French. That’s something that needs to be learnt.

In fact, even James who does go to school doesn’t speak French. How come? Everyone picks it up after a few months in those moving to France TV programmes. Well, we’re in an area where there are very few resident foreigners so the schools don’t have the experience of dealing with them. What they did was to put him in a small class (four other kids) with a teacher who spoke a little English. After about three months, the children started speaking English learnt from him (not a development that went down well with the other parents) and even now a year later he just speaks isolated words like for the numbers or colours and doesn’t form French sentences.

Will he speak it by the time he goes to primary school? Somehow I doubt it but we’ll see.

There’s only a couple of weeks to go to the Spanish exam and seemingly way too much stuff to be done for it.

For a change the Open University are experimenting with the use of a photograph as the stimulus for the oral exam. This means that we’ve three articles about Spanish painting and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries to read at the moment and will be handed a photo on the day itself. Then we’ve 10 minutes to prepare a 3 minute presentation on that photo using information from the texts that they’ve given us.

I suspect that it’ll work out OK as it usually seems to with the Spanish. Unlike the French department they seem to be on the level and trying to see you at your best rather than having some trick question as seemed all too common in the French course. The overall effect of that difference was that my French marks seemed to be almost random whereas the Spanish marks have been very consistent.

That also leaves the final book of the course to complete which is fair to middling essential as I think the written question will be based on it.

We seem to be getting more and more popular with the Spanish looking for a short break outside Spain.

As we’re within two hours drive of Barcelona, it’s an easy trip for them yet it’s a very different area than they’re used to. For one thing Barcelona is a very active city whereas we’re in a very quiet area. However, people tend to like to get away somewhere “different” for their breaks and although we’re right beside Spain the local culture is very different.

But then it’s always been like that. So we’ve no idea why we’ve started picking up Spanish guests in increasing numbers. They all love it though!