Foreign Perspectives

That’s what we have to do for the oral part of the exam in, worryingly, about two weeks time. In fact, it’ll all be over this time two weeks from now which is even more worrying!

It’s far from easy coming to something like that even in English but we’ve to do it in Spanish which you’d think would make it even harder to do. In some ways, it does, of course. We obviously don’t have the range of grammar or vocabulary in Spanish that we do in English naturally. However, it’s the sort of thing that we’ve been doing off and on throughout the language courses and from that perspective it makes it that little bit easier.

Not easy, though!

We’ll be given a photo of the painting in the exam and then have 10 minutes to prepare a 3 minute presentation on it and how it fits into the context of the society of the time. As with most things on the Spanish course, it’s designed to make sure that you can’t prepare the whole presentation in advance so that 10 minutes will really need to be used. Any old presentation won’t do either as it needs to be reasonably well structured.

Try doing that in English sometime to see how difficult it can be!

One of the surprising things that I’m finding as I gradually roll out our Whole Earth Guide is that it’s surprisingly difficult to assemble the information for some places that you’d expect to be easy to find travel information about.

Our latest addition is Giverny where Monet lived. That one wasn’t too bad in that the people now running the house have quite a reasonable website but even there the directions are pretty wooly given that, as they say, the majority of people getting there are American who generally need slightly better directions as they don’t travel abroad terribly often. Having said that, the number of escorted tours leaving from Paris might well refect that the Americans are largely using those rather than going to the village under their own steam.

However, I’ve found that it’s quite rare to find a site combining information about the place with information as to how to get to it. Very surprisingly a wonderful place like Cordoba has virtually no tourist information on it at all.

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.