We met a famous Spanish actor today in the immersion section of the class. Juan Anillo spoke about his life as an actor and actively tried to get me to ask him questions in Spanish. He seemed like a very warm and personable fellow. I got his picture with me. I hope I can upload it to my blog. It will have to wait until I get back home.

Interesting fact: We say “break a leg” to actors for good luck. In Spain, they say “Mucha Mierda.” You can use Google translator if you need to.

My iPhone doesn’t work here. That is, the data is mucho expensivo (Spanish!) so I turned the phone off. I can take pictures, but can´t send via iPhone. I figured how to transfer pix to laptop, but it appears that the connection is so slow that pix might be a
problem to send. A yousendit file I wanted to send to a client said it would take 25 hours!

The school teaches grammar and conversation in the morning. In the afternoon, they deliver lectures so we can build our listening skills. I understood most of a 2-hour lecture on the Spanish news media (it’s growing! People read newspapers here, unlike the US.) Also, the papers are very partisan. No fair and balanced news here. People buy the paper that reflects their opinions. And yes, Rupert Murdoch owns papers here. Is he King of the World?

Class is getting easier. My head still spins at the end of the morning. It is good. To learn a language you really need a lot of drill and repetition and speaking. Before I came to Spain, I listened to many hours of Spanish language CDs. That was good for building vocabulary and listening skills, but when you have to speak, it is like starting from square one.

The teachers are very good. I’m getting more comfortable in restaurants and trying to think of stories to tell using Spanish. If you try hard enough, you can make verbs do a lot of work for you!