A Four-Day Week

No school on Friday, and a four-day week came just in time. The Monday through Friday class regimen, while productive in terms of progress in the language, becomes a wee bit routine, dare one say tedious. Kind of like work. I now see why so many of my fellow students opted for one, two, maybe three weeks en escuela, and then, vamos! I am about to enter week number six, and while alternately feeling both capable and then underwater, a decision has been reached. In March, I have a series of visitors from my U.S. life, and it has become clear that going to school all week while simultaneously enjoying Valencia, and Espana in general, with mi amigos, is just not possible. Classes just take too much juice...and that, in combination with some very intermittent night-time sleep, as well as my advanced age, have led me to deciding that time with friends in Spain, (because that's where I am, after all) trumps language immersion, at least a little bit. And so...I will shorten my planned studies by a couple of weeks, to use my energy toward some fun, not just hard work, because that is exactly what learning a new language is...hard work. Not hard work to regret, but hard work that should have a reasonable end date. I think light dawned on marble head recently when in class we began to tackle gerunds. I mean, gerunds for Christ's sake...I had to google the word just to remember what they were. (BTW, if you go way back to seventh grade, they are verbs masquerading as nouns.) Lo siento, if I don't worry about gerunds in Ingles, I'm certainly not going to worry about them en Espanol. So be it, as they say, or amen.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------One of the joys of being back in school is, well, being back in school. One of the sadder parts is saying adios to fellow students with whom one bonds; even over the short term, say a week or two, you share five or six hours a day over a common effort, watch and listen to each other make achingly slow progress, sometimes stumbling, sometimes surprisingly victorious. Today, I had to bid farewell to Heiner, a fellow pensionista in his 70s as well, from Switzerland. Leaving after a couple of weeks here for Barcelona to visit his son...Heiner and I shared the awareness that embarking on a new language at this point in life is a challenge, but one we shared with open arms. And Sabrina, from a small town near Stuttgard, who returns to Germany only to turn around and voyage to Italy next week with twelve friends, in a huge house in Puglia. Such is the advantage of living in this relatively small space called Europe. I do occasionally dream of life as an expat......................................................................................................

L to R: Yours Truly; Agnes, Netherlands; Heiner, Switzerland; Alexandra, Montreal; Sabrina, Germany; Carol, Professora