¿Cuánto?

At the end of the first week of intensive Spanish lessons, we have only just got round to learning how to count. This is by no means a criticism of the teaching, as numbers can easily be self-taught but, judging from the competency around the table, few had bothered. That includes me. This is because it is boring. I was able to count, roughly, up to around 20, but much higher resulted in errors and guesswork.

However, numbers are important. We already failed to attend a lesson on time earlier this week, as I had misunderstood the times. Prices on the market are similarly tricky, especially once I learned that among the 'exceptions', there is a special word for the often used 'five hundred'. While I had been listening out for 'cinco cientos', in fact the stallholders had been holding out their hands for 'quinientos'.

Being the end of the week, the teachers planned a learning game. The game, "What am I?" (¿Qué soy yo?), is the familiar process of selecting a card bearing an object and attempting to divine its identity solely by asking questions of the other players. This required us to remember and correctly decline nouns and adjectives, as well as differentiate between ser and estar. Amongst cards depicting animals, items of clothing, and furniture, I was landed with describing a rainbow (arco iris) - something with which I would struggle even in English.

In the afternoon's class, we tried to jump start the conversation with an article from the newspaper. The teacher chose one of the free 'metro' papers, principally because it contains short articles on (hopefully) simple topics.

Skipping over the pages of articles on football and the approaching Copa América, much to my teacher's dismay, I selected an article on recycling. This turned out to be a poor choice, as the journalist had chosen to write it in a specifically emotive idiom, which avoided the use of verbs in favour of sentences solely comprising lists of nouns and adjectives. Demonstrating her quick-thinking and great adeptness for teaching even awkward buggers like me, my teacher suggested we try to find the missing subject and verb in order to reformulate the sentence to be grammatically correct. This became tiresome after the first paragraph, so she (equally astutely) proposed that we give it up as a bad job. We ended up discussing an article on Gaspar Noe's film, 'Love', which courted controversy at Cannes and talked generally about explicit and award-winning cinema at the French film festival.

K and I repaired to the excellent Café 202 for some end of the week cervezas artesenales. K opted for a 'Michelado', which is any light beer served in a salt-rimmed glass with the addition of lemon juice, black pepper, Tabasco sauce, and merquén (a smoked, ground chilli pepper).

Spicing up the beer

Similarly indulgently, we proceeded to vegetarian restaurant, Sujo. In recognition, the waiter gave us a friendly smile and indulged our poor Spanish. K went with the heavy but delicious dish of pastel de choclo, while I indulged the Chilean penchant for bread and had another enormous sandwich, this time filled with a pseudo-fish slice of nori-wrapped tofu.