I have just come out of my first Spanish lesson in months. There were some shameful shortcomings, but still a good session despite having to do it over Skype. I was a bit startled to see my teacher, the one from Medellin, had blinding white hair, partly thanks to lockdown perhaps. Their lockdown is in a small studio apartment as their old building was apparently the locus of an outbreak so they fled. The pretty little balcony that I studied with her on is now vacant; the school is shut and all their pupils are online.
Naturally the conversation was dominated by the coronavirus, though in future lessons we will read and watch videos as well. I’m not entirely convinced by the notetaking at the moment. Her teaching technique to take notes for her student and then review them together. I think that works better when they are handwritten rather than typed out. Well, let’s see.
It was good to be praised for my pronunciation at least, after a couple of months of feeling like I just can’t get my mouth around Chinese consonants.
At one point she asked me to say something in Chinese and I blanked out completely. Hopefully this is an indication of good compartmentalisation between the languages rather than ignorance.
Last night was my turn to cook and I must say, I did a good job. Four extremely well cooked fillets of mackerel, with crispy skin, accompanied by a seaweed salad and a dish of kimchi, rice cakes, broccoli and oyster mushrooms, which was my own concoction and came out very tasty indeed. Well done, said I to myself, and grimaced horribly when praised.