The Tuesday When it was Raining. It was raining when I woke
up, it was raining when I went to school, it was raining during school, it was
raining after school. I know that we’re in invierno (winter), and that it is
the rainy season, but Tuesday was definitely the rainiest I’ve experienced so
far!
My teacher this week is named Mercedes. Most people from
Latin America have several names, and they choose which name they prefer to go
by. Mercedes is my teacher’s second name; Ana is her first. We are getting
along famously! Monday afternoon she told me that she was nervous to have me as
a student because I seemed so solemn whenever she walked by my “classroom” last
week. She seems relieved that I have a sense of humor. I blamed my seriousness
on the agony of studying groups of irregular verbs in pretérito. This week we are working towards refining my use of pretérito, and I’m simultaneously working on imperfect. I still
confuse the tenses a lot, but the fog in my brain is starting to thin out.
Before it can dissolve completely, however, I’m sure I’ll be thrown into
another bowl of Spanish soup…
As we were studying imperfect, Mercedes had me write out a
couple sample sentences on the table to make sure I understood the forms. I’m
not sure why I came up with the sentence I wrote: Mientras nosotros comíamos, el gato moría. (While
we were eating, the cat was dying). Pobre gato! We must have laughed for a good
ten minutes after that!
Tuesday afternoon Mercedes asked me who my favorite actor
was. Thinking on the spot, I said Sandra Bullock. Mercedes asked why, and I
tried to say, “She is very funny!” Instead I said, “¡Ella es
muy cómodo!” which means, “She is very comfortable!” In my defense, cómico and cómodo
sound fairly similar. This, por supuesto (of course), got us laughing again.
For lunch on Tuesday Olga served us a
delicious sopa con rábanos (soup with radishes) and a side plate of verduras
(vegetables). I wish I could tell you the names of the various vegetables, but
I haven’t had most of them in the States before. One looked like a gourd of
some kind, and I used my cuchara (spoon) to scrape out the insides. I described
one of the other vegetables to Mercedes and she guessed it was a güisquil (which is pronounced a lot like “whiskey”), though I
don’t really have a way of verifying that. Either way, the meal was brilliant—as
Ali would say.
Cada día (every day) during the lunch
break there is a fútbol game on TV. Though I didn’t
watch it much in Africa, it is really starting to grow on me here. It’s easy to
see why it’s so popular with most of the world. It’s actually surprising that fútbol isn’t as big of a deal in the States.
“The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it; for he founded it upon the seas and
established it upon the waters.”
Psalm 24:1 – 2
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