Learning Spanish

Well it's been lazy times here in Mexico. Usually I try to use my time well but lately have just been letting the days flow by and have not been getting much done. Also I used an energetic ascension code as I thought it was time to jump up a level so I spent a few days spaced out and sleeping a lot. Last night I had a great chat with Alan and Denise from our old Matrix practice group in Vancouver and that helped me get back on track.

Sitting under the stars tonight amidst the rhapsody of cricket songs, I realize that spring has completely arrived. The days are sunny and quite hot and I no longer need to sleep in my long underwear at night in the unheated apartment. Even though I'm making interesting new friends here, I do find myself missing the Matrix practice groups and wishing there were opportunities to practice here. I've taken to writing long posts on the Matrix message board to keep some connection with the community. After reading Fred Alan Wolfe's introduction to quantum physics, I was hoping for a good argument when I questioned the standard interpretation of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle but people agreed with me. So I've taken to reading a book on quantum computing to see if anything connects.


My Spanish classes started off a little shaky. On the first day, I understood about half of what the dynamic maestra said. But I decided to stay and walked back down to the registrar and signed up and bought the textbook. The next day of class we had a surprise test. Our instructor was going to exempt me but I opted to write it to find out how much I'd learned by studying "Spanish in 10 Minutes a Day".

The next day she took up the test by reading everyone's answers and asking us to decide if they were right or wrong. She didn't give names except for the really funny asnwers, after which she would make a caricature of a serious face and say the person's name. Then everyone would break out laughing. There was one question that I hadn't understood but I had heard someone behind me say it meant "What are you wearing?" So I had made a list of the clothing that I'd learned. Unfortunately the question turned out to be "Are you tired?" So everyone got a good laugh at that. If it was a high school class the students behind me would have deliberately mentioned the wrong information as a good practical joke! But already it was easy to see that the class was all in the same boat and just having fun with each other, so I fit right in. And I did end up doing quite well on the test.

But there was an unusual ritual that took me a few days to figure out. Every day about halfway through the class there would be a knock on the door. The maestra would open the door and a friend of hers would be there with a different large flower in full bloom each time. I wondered if this was a standard practice in a Mexican University and thought about recommending it when I return to Jarvis. But before long everyone began talking about Valentine's Day, which is much more important here than in Canada.

So sitting in class watching the maestra with a flower on her desk as she wrote on the white board with a dried-out blue marker, I decided to drop by the stationery store after class. (The stationery store was easy to find because it was next to the cell phone store, one of my personal landmarks). I bought two plumonas then found a gift store on the way home and bought a gift bag and some ribbon.* The next day I added the gift bag to the small pile on the maestra's desk. She came in and was thrilled to see everything, and even though some of the other gifts were thoughtful and beautiful, she held up the plumonas twice with a gleeful smile. A gift from one teacher to another.

A few days later she told us we were going to have another test and held up some home-made cue cards. So before class the next day we were asking each other what we thought the test was about when the maestra again swept into the room and handed out three cards to each of us. She wanted us to make sentences with the cards. One person would read a card and everyone who had a matching verb or pronoun was to hold up their card. She pretended to keep score on the board. It was a fantastic learning activity, one that I hope to adapt to my math class at some point.

By now I'm getting to know most of the people in the class and somehow I've ended up in the rowdy corner where we have a lot of fun. I'm thinking of starting up a study group as it is good to take a good two or three hours a day outside of class to review and to look ahead. Today a few of us went to the gringo cafe for lunch and stayed there for a long time. Then this woman from upstate New York, Christina, and I went to the library to drink Corona and review the section of the book that we had both missed in January. Before we knew it, it was almost supper time. That is what I mean about the days flowing by.

* One thing about Mexico, is things just normally show up when you need them. You don't have to go looking for them. It's kind of the opposite of Canada, where the things you deliberately go shopping for have mysteriously disappeared from the shelves by the time you get to them.

Daily Life

First, best wishes to my Vancouver friends after the unfortunate bombing* that blew out half a block of stores near Broadway and Heather. I ate at the targeted taco restaurant when I first moved out west. I don't know what's happening to that once beautiful city.

This is a good time to take a break from the main story line to look at daily life in Mexico. Since today's blog contains a number of pictures, it is best viewed with Mozilla Firefox. Also keep in mind that blogspot's image server bp0 doesn't always work so if there are fewer than nine pictures in this entry then you'll need to reload the page.

There are a number of luxuries here in the mountains: clean air, flouride-free water, steady sunshine with longer daylight hours, the ability to see the stars, inexpensive local produce, and deep peace of mind. Weekly maid service is included in the rent for your apartment although you do need to pay an extra five dollars to have your laundry done. Dave says he considers it his patriotic duty to hire Mexicans for maid service and yard work.

Another wonderful luxury is fresh-squeezed juice. In Vancouver if you want to buy half a litre of fresh squeezed juice you add it to the mortgage loan on your tiny condo overlooking the houseboats on the Fraser River. In any case it took some time watching people walk around with large juice glasses, wishing I could justify the expense, before I had the classic "duh" moment: the people buying the juices were Mexicans, maybe the price is different here? So I went to the juice stand and was delighted to find that jugo only cost 10 pesos, or less than a dollar. With an abundance of flavors I quickly became addicted to daily juices, my favorite being mandarin. (See if you can guess the flavors from the picture.**)

Roast chickens from small farms are everywhere. You simply walk down the sidewalk and a merchant will hold a roast chicken in front of you. You grab it with your left hand and pass him fifty pesos with your right. Of course this does force you to pay close attention when you walk down the sidewalk so you know when to duck.

A few days ago I took a walk to the botanical garden, a magical cactus forest built alongside a canyon. The pictures below only begin to do it justice.

Dinner parties appear to be quite common and generous hospitality is embedded in the local culture. Dave and Jo have invited me to two more gatherings since I came here. Their friends appear to be in a different social strata than Jim and Therese but are equally interesting. One woman lives on a farm near town, has nine dogs, and is actively involved in educating poorer Mexican students. Another vivaciously loves the Mexican culture, especially its cuisine, and may start giving me cooking classes. During one of these nights there was an annual event around the corner that we went to afterwards. It was a hybrid art show with paintings, sculptures, and furniture displays that was called simply "The Aurora".

It's also been surprisingly easy to get used to living without TV. However one of the first things I did do after moving in and having more reliable internet was set up a US proxy server*** and catch up on this year's fantastic season of The Celebrity Apprentice. I do miss Corner Gas but Canada, with its culture of overregulation, doesn't have any working proxy servers. And Canada won't even let its own residents use a proxy server to watch US shows so if you're also a fan of Donald Trump's show you're out of luck.

On the topic of the web, has anyone noticed how when web pages take a long time to load it's usually the ad servers that are slowing them down? Just watch the status bar on your browser when a web page is loading slowly and you'll see it happening. I wonder how long it will be before hackers realize that to take down the internet they simply have to take out the ad servers. These probably aren't even that well protected, given the low priority that companies put on their functionality. That must be the first rule of hacking: engage the low priority systems to disable the high priority ones.

The main story line continues next time. Amidst steeply increasing dyslexia, what are the chances that I'll survive Spanish class?


* If the video doesn't work, click on "Global BC Stories" and scroll down to "W. Broadway Explosion". BTW, a great site for travellers to keep up on world news is here. It gives a map of global incidents so you can click on places where you or your friends live.

** Orange, mystery green, grapefruit, mandarin, tangerine, and carrot.

*** A proxy server lets you watch shows without getting the message, "This program is not available in your country". If you're using Firefox there's an excellent proxy add-on called "Foxy Proxy". Active proxy servers can be found here. If you find a Canadian proxy server that actually works please send me the stats!

Back to University?

Time passes differently in Mexico. There is a peace here that extends the days. Getting about is quite simple, a short walk here, a few pesos there. Tonight as I sit on the moonlit patio listening to the crickets chirp and the thunder rumble between flashes of sheet lightning, it has been a full day. Even after a few hours studying Spanish, a long chat in the gringo cafe, a luxuriously lengthy dinner party and time spent helping clean up while sharing stories, there is still plenty of time to spend online.

There was an incredible thunderstorm last night. Hail beat down on the roof so hard that it sounded like it was heralding the apocalypse, and the torrent of rain that followed tamed the dusty roads and scrubbed the air clean. Still it only rains at night here. The days are mostly warm and sunny. As I write this the thunder turns to another downpour and I move inside leaving the door open to listen to the rain's aggressive rhythm.


With high hopes, I entered the university. There was a table with brochures for Spanish classes just inside the door. Even though they were for new students who didn't know Spanish, the brochures didn't contain a word of English. A woman behind the table said, "¿Español?" I started to ask questions in English but she too only spoke Spanish. I wondered, maybe I can fold the brochures into meaningful shapes and make myself clear that way? Just as I was about to do this she pointed to a back corner. I went there and found a glassed in office and a ticket window but no one was in either one. So I came back. Somehow I made my point. Nobody there. She smiled and pointed to a woman walking into the office behind her and said "Espere". So I waited. And waited. So long that I felt forgotten. I went back to the locked room in the back of the university and peered through the window and read a sign about Spanish classes that didn't give much information.

Then I realized, this is like the library! These were the snapping turtle women. So what I have to do is find Arnold. So I started on a quest, looking down the hallways trying to find the open office where Arnold would be. I thought, maybe he's on break and checked the cafeteria. But no Arnold was to be found. I felt abandoned.

Finally the woman who had been pointed out left the front office and motioned to me to follow her. She took me to the back office and I waited while she opened it and stood behind the window. We tried to communicate without much luck but I knew what she was going to eventually say. After a while it came: Manana, diez.

So shortly before ten the next morning, I pushed through the throngs of chattering twenty-somethings into the university. The same woman was behind the window in the back. But now my luck changed. She pointed me to the language office where to my delight there was a smiling clerk who spoke English. When I asked about the Spanish class the clerk told me that it had already been going for a month. She paused and looked me in the eyes, as if deciding what to do. "Why don't you go up and see if it's too advanced for you or not?" I was elated.


It didn't take long to find room cien diecinueve. Leslie from the cafe was there so I sat beside her. She said, "I thought you'd show up". There were a number of other students there, mostly retired folks, both women and men. Someone grinned and said, "This is the best class in the university." They told me about how dramatically the professor presented the lessons because she would never use English and would often act out or exaggerate the meanings of words. They said she dressed in traditional Mexican style and part of the fun was seeing what new outfit she wore when she walked into class each day. At that moment the maestra flowed into the room with a handful of books and a long green gown. She took a moment to arrange the books on a small desk at the front then looked at me and made a comment in Spanish about a new student. I felt a little out of place but she smiled and taught me my first Spanish word of the day, "Bienvenido."

New Spaces

My friend Connie says that I'm picky, kind of like a male princess, because I like things to be inexpensive yet nice and to come easily. Like learning Spanish with the least possible effort and finding nice apartments that only cost a little. Or sitting on my bed writing a blog with a state-of-the-art computer and sun streaming through the windows while record-setting snowstorms hit Ontario. Am I really like that?

As I stood in front of the blue door, I was a bit worried about the impression I'd made the day before on the phone and not knowing the landlord's name. I wondered, is this my apartment on the left here, this small space with the tiny window? As a clairsentient psychic*, I thrive on energetic space. In my ground floor apartments in Toronto and Vancouver I would actually get shudders from feeling the negative energy of people walking or driving by, kind of like drinking a margarita and getting a mouthful of deet. Of course this tended to make me as cranky as a Tim Hortons addict in a long Monday morning lineup. Not a good situation. It also helps to have lots of light and as a moderately severe dyslexic I need organization. (This might sound high-maintenance but as Ron would tell you from the times he's hosted me in Victoria I'm not high-maintenance in the least little tiny bit.)

A stately Welsh-Canadian ex-pat with a beard opened the door, and to my delight introduced himself as Dave and invited me in. I told myself, at least try and make a good impression. I picked up the smallest bags intending to leave them inside the door and quickly come back for the other two. But before I could do that Dave picked the others up and led me into a beautiful walled-in yard with a house on the right and a spiral of moulded concrete stairs ahead of us. As we climbed the steps I was thinking, this doesn't feel right, I do look like a lazy male princess with a porter. The next thing you know I'll be wearing fancy sunglasses and bicycle shorts and running into pedestrians while talking on a cell phone in a silver SUV. I told Dave, I don't know how you ended up with the heavy bags, and he tersely said, it's because you took the light ones. I thought, this is a great start!

Sounding like Sean Connery with his Welsh accent, Dave showed me around the pequeño apartment. I immediately appreciated its intelligent design. A bright kitchen overlooking the yard, a pull-out pantry, a gas fireplace, windows to the patio beside the bed, a stone bathroom, wireless internet and even a local Mexican phone line. Windows almost all round, the patio and a wall as a buffer from the street, and no one above me! I felt like I was in a funky treehouse of energetic freedom.

As Dave headed off to Spanish class I took a walk around the neighborhood. It was flat. Dusty sunny roads, empty lots, and a dry riverbed running perpendicular to the street. Lots of open space. I loved it.

And it turned out that what I'd thought to be diffidence in Dave was simply purposefulness. He and his wife Jo were excellent hosts. When he got back from Spanish class Dave drove me around the neighborhood pointing out the most useful stores. Then a couple of days later after I helped in the garden for about four seconds he and Jo invited me for a beer in the backyard which turned into a dinner of aromatic cheeses, avocado salad, and delicious spiced beef from the Tuesday market. Dave ran to the store to get more beer and we chatted about the neighborhood and places to travel. He and Jo told were off to visit the hot springs for a few days. We discussed the book which I'd been helping my dad prepare for publication, a historical novel that spans two generations. Later Dave and Jo described their experience of buying the house and living in a small room upstairs while the main house was remodeled and discussed the improvements that they were continuing to make, especially in the garden. They'd decided to use less space in the house so that they could maximize the outdoor space. As Dave put it, they realized they didn't need as much indoor space as they thought they did.

Meanwhile, it was as if the whole neighborhood sensed I was new. My next door neighbor, William from southern California, introduced himself and showed me around his house. I found a cafe nearby which had fantastic Americano coffee, friendly gringos, and a beautiful sun-soaked patio. Sharing a table with a woman from New England one crowded day, she told me about an introductory Spanish class which had an expressive and flamboyant professor and was the best class in the university. As I finished my mushroom and cheese omelette I realized that the perfect Spanish class for a dyslexic had just shown up. However it had already been running for a month. In Canada it would be impossible to get in to a university course that late. But this was Mexico. Would they let me in here? Would I even understand a word they were saying? It might be a challenge, but I decided to head down to the university and see if they would let a clueless gringo enroll.

To be continued...


*Clairsentience involves sensing and reading energy and the information it contains.

Interference

Even though it was only October when I first started making travel arrangements for Mexico many apartments had already been booked. Although there were lots of high end apartments in the $1500-$4000 range, I was looking to reduce my expenses, not increase them! So it took a fair bit of creative web searching to find places to stay. Since it was hard to get a place for the full six months, I decided to pick places I really liked first and then do what I could to fill in the missing time.

So I booked an apartment for April, May, and June first. I also really wanted to stay at Jim and Therese's place so I booked with them for January. Then it was up to trusty Craig's List to find me a spot for Feb and March. Luckily one showed up the first time I checked. But to me this middle apartment was a bit of a wild card because it was hard to tell from the pictures how big it really was, and of course I didn't know the town so I wasn't sure what area it was in.

So the day before I moved I decided to do a walk-by to get to know the neighborhood I was moving into. The first thing I found out was that the street I was moving to wasn't even on the map! Luckily I was near the tourist office and the clerk was very helpful, giving me a new map and showing the location on the old one. So I started to walk. And I walked and I walked and I walked. After a long time I was in a slum-like section of town near the highway. I wandered a bit then bought a Dr Pepper like one of those thirsty cowboy guys in soft drink commercials and sat down on some dusty steps with the sun beating down on my head. I took out the map from the tourist bureau and of course being extremely dyslexic I'd ended up in the wrong area. So I walked back a number of blocks and eventually found my new street. By this time I was so tired I just wanted to get home and didn't look around the neighborhood at all.

I tried to call the new landlords on my cell but my cell wasn't working properly. So I called them long distance on VOIP. A man answered whose name I didn't know because the phone crackled when he told me his name. He seemed a little teed off that I'd waited so long to call. We set up a time for me to come the next day.

The next morning I got up at 7am to take out the garbage. Dyslexia struck again and as soon as I stepped out the door I took a bad fall onto the stone sidewalk and down the hill and couldn't move for a couple of minutes. Finally I could stand and took the garbage down. Luckily I didn't have a sprain and was only bleeding a little so I went back upstairs to finish packing.

Just when I was beginning to wonder what the whole deal was with this move everything began to turn around. Jim and Therese came up to return my deposit and check out the apartment and Jim offered to drive me to the new place. By now my cell phone was working again so I called ahead and said I'd be a little late, which was lucky as there were so many one-way streets in the area that it took extra time to get there. Jim dropped me off across from the new apartment, shook my hand, and wished me well saying he wished things had worked out so that I could stay longer. I scanned the map looking for a way for him to get out of the area but he jumped in the car with a smile, did a u-turn, and headed back down the one-way street. Facing an unpretentious blue door, I rang the bell.

To be continued...

Interesting Friends

George Ure, whose web site I read for news updates, keeps encouraging us to think about what our marketable skills are. A couple of weeks ago, Jim had rung my doorbell and was asking about a problem he was having with his computer. It was running slowly. I told him I had some experience owning a Windows machine and could look up information on the web to try and help him out. This took a few days, as the internet was intermittent (say that three times fast), as were my work habits, but I downloaded a few pages of helpful information and thought I had enough to go on.

So we set up an appointment and the first thing Jim did was show me around his house. It was incredibly beautiful and well-designed, based on different levels with most of the rooms built around a central square of patios and gardens. We went to one of the upper rooms that had an office looking out on the town and got to work. Jim's computer was running so slowly that if you clicked on a new window it took up to a minute for that window to show up. He must have the patience of a saint! It turned out that none of my notes were useful after all. But I've learned to follow information. So much of computers (and life in Mexico too) involves following clues, like trails of breadcrumbs or links in web research, so I kept trying things and paying attention to what showed up. It took over an hour, but eventually I ended up in the right control panel and changed the default settings and the computer ran good as new. Was I relieved!

Jim was ecstatic. I'd told him I like fixing things and find it really satisfying to get systems to work properly. ( Of course the only things I'm much good at fixing are software and of course people using Matrix work but I always welcome the opportunities. ) There was a drafting table in the office and Jim told me he used to be a professional architect. This must be why he could do such a good job designing the house! He showed me around a little more and I asked a lot of interested questions as I love beautiful spaces. When he designed the house he'd put a surprising amount of thought into the sightlines and the flow of natural light. He even thought about how skylights could be used twice, with some of the light coming into the top room and the rest being carried down to the room underneath. He had special stone-like glass in the balconies that fit right in with the floor patterns but which scattered light into the rooms below. He'd also been careful to build so that he wasn't looking into others' balconies, being on a steep hill, but others who built after him were not as considerate. Apparently there used to be a bylaw about sightlines but the town government changes every December and some developers simply grease politicians' hands at the end of their terms to get the required approvals.

Jim asked how he could pay me back but he and Therese had already invited me to come to dinner a couple of nights later so I said that was enough. Two nights later I showed up at their door in my best clothes with a bottle of Chilean wine and joined the two of them and a neighbour in the living room. Therese had made an incredible humus as an appetizer which contained parsley and was the color of guacamole. The neighbour had lived in the area since the seventies, even before this section of town was built up. They all told me more about the town culture. Apparently there was a problem with Mexican teenagers going to America and coming back different and forming gangs. Since we were in a very mixed neighborhood, the house next door to us was owned by a very poor Mexican woman who had had a number of children who were now growing up. There was a gang that met in our street nightly, and apparently the woman's daughter had taken a machete and carved a chunk out of someone's abdomen a couple of nights before. There was no danger to us, as the gang members only went after each other, but it was tragic to hear that American culture could have such an awful influence on the local teenagers. Jim, Therese, and their neighbour all knew the teenagers and their parents by their first names, having watched them grow up. Also they heard a lot of news from their Mexican servants and contractors.

The conversation switched to lighter topics when we sat down for dinner. Therese had prepared some fresh salmon with mashed potatoes, cactus, and corn. We continued to drink wine and Therese turned out to be a fantastic storyteller. She had us laughing so hard we didn't notice the time passing. She'd also prepared a wonderful layered dessert with pomegranite juice, stewed guava, and ice cream. Before we knew it, it was after eleven. As I said goodbye at the door we heard a train whistle in the distance and I realized that Therese and Jim were now more than just acquantances, they'd become friends.

It was a bittersweet evening though as I was scheduled to move to my next apartment in two days. There's a lot to catch up on so look for another post in the next day or two!

(Apologies for the lack of current pictures but I did add pictures to the "Farmers and Shoppers" post below).

Catching Up

Spring arrived a few days ago in this small Mexican town. It's so hot now that you can't stay in the sun for long. Even the Mexicans prefer the shade and the only spots available on the benches at the Jardin are in the hot sun. But I can cool off by thinking about the snowstorm in Toronto that Bhagwan told me about. Apparently they had to close the schools last Friday. Brings back memories of the time Mel Lastman called in the army to help dig us out. Of course the Toronto School Board didn't close the schools that day. I guess they learned their lesson!

It has been wonderful to keep in touch with so many people using Skype and VOIP. Connie and I have been doing frequent Matrix sessions between Mexico and Australia on Skype chat. But it does get a little lonely here at times even though I meet people during the day. Tonight I met a woman from Vancouver who said there's much more snow there than last year. I thought about Alan and Denise and all the Surrey folks buying parkas as I walked down the cobblestoned street with her in my t-shirt and sandals. Wish everyone could be here too! In any case, I often leave Skype on after supper and if anyone wants to chat my user name is mgoodes. That's for those of you who still talk to me!

So between wanting to meet more people and seeing Spanish appear all over web pages when I'm browsing, I've been working very hard to learn Spanish.* About a month ago I finally got a library card. You might remember the snapping-turtle woman who kept saying manana at the library. Finally one day manana came. There was a stern looking guy at the counter this time who was a ringer for Arnold Schwarzenegger**. Except he was Spanish looking. I thought, if anyone can give me a library card, Arnold can. So I showed him my ID and paid the $15 deposit and the next thing I knew I was signing out an excellent book to learn Spanish with. Arnold scowled his approval and the snapping-turtle woman actually gave me a crooked smile. It's time to belong, I thought.

Back when I used to enjoy teaching as much as my friend Dan at Jarvis does I read a lot of books about the brain and how we learn. One of them was called "Accelerated Learning". It was based on studies in Austria (home of Freud) in which they tried to teach people languages quickly. They would read to people while playing classical music and also give the students a book with their own language and the new one side by side so that they could read along. The results were fantastic.

So I thought the closest thing to this setup would be to watch videos in Spanish with English subtitles or vice-versa. Luckily I remembered walking by a Blockbuster my first day here (thanks to my mother who trained me in the fine art of movie-watching early on). So I trooped down there a few days later to try my luck with my Canadian Blockbuster card. After all, it works in both Toronto and Vancouver, I thought, which are on different sides of the planet, so why not here?

Well it turned out they wouldn't take my card but they did give me a Mexican one without even talking my credit card number. So now I have two Blockbuster cards! I don't think world-traveler Terry can even top that. But the clerk warned me that down here you need a Mexican DVD player because we're in a different zone. I said, I have a Mac, no worries (that's some Australian for Connie's benefit). So I took the DVD home and threw it in the Mac and no worries: the player said pick your zone, so I picked zone four and it played beautifully. I just hope I can rent zone 4 videos when I go back to Toronto!

While in the store I wondered, what is silly enough to hold my ADD attention span and simple enough to understand? Then I saw it staring at me from the rack: Seinfeld season 4. It turned out to be even funnier in Spanish than it is in English. I did try to learn a few interesting expressions like "Master of your domain" and "they're real and they're spectacular" but the actors talked too fast. So the next time I rented King of the Hill because they talk slowly. Boomhauer was much easier to understand in Spanish than in English. Tonight it was back to the video store for a choice between The Simpsons or Sex and the City. You can guess which one I picked.

So my routine for quite a few days became to read 25 pages a day out loud from the Spanish book and watch Spanish videos on my Mac. One day I was sitting on the upper balcony reading out loud and I heard a voice say, "Hey, how are you?" I thought it was someone on the street below so I ignored the voice but it persisted. Then it occurred to me to look up on the roof and there was a young Mexican guy waving at me. He said I spoke pretty good Spanish. He said his name was Lupe, which was hilarious because I'd just watched that Seinfeld episode where George asks Lupe not to tuck in the sheets. We ended up having a good chat in English. If Bhagwan was there they probably would have sat on the roof together and chatted in Hindi.

That's enough for now. I've still got a lot of catching up to do. Enjoy the snow and your zone 1 videos my Canadian friends.

* Because my dyslexia has been extremely bad lately I'm reluctant to take a class without learning a whole bunch of Spanish on my own first. Unfortunately I keep forgetting what I've learned.

** The real Arnold has a house here. It was featured on a Sunday tour of famous houses based, interestingly enough, from the library. Also the library has run like clockwork ever since the Spanish Arnold showed up.