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.