Friday - Week IX

Woke up to find a cloudy sky and a misty breeze. By the time I left the apartment it was fairly warm over 50 degrees and the sun was even trying to peek out here and there. I decided to take a long walk along the Claddagh promenade and up the lighthouse causeway since I had extra time before I needed to meet my students.

It was such a wonderful walk and lots of people were out jogging and walking their dogs and enjoy the almost balmy weather when you compare it to deep freeze we had the past few weeks.

You can see in some of the pictures where the seagulls were relaxing on the beach were the tide had already begun to recede. It looks a bit like someone made tiny white brush marks on a canvas. I wasn't sure of the pack of seagulls were napping or just hoping food would magical appear in front of them.

Mom landed today from Boston and she took a bus from Shannon airport to Galway where my sister met her. I called on my way to the pub and she was napping as you can imagine since her flight landed at around 6:00am and she had very little sleep overnight.

My sesson today was great. Marisol and Vanessa worked for about two hours on how to answer bussiness calls, how to speak to colleagues and superiors and how to handle disgruntled clients. It was nice to be able to combine my experience in customer service with my English languagee training and it was clearly helpful to Marisol.

When Patrica, Maria Jesus, Martin, Nuria and Diego arrived we then began discussing relationships which turned rather philosophical at times. I was pretty impressed that they carried on an hour long conversation about emotions and love and what really matters in life all in English. They're getting so advanced even though Vanessa over heard me talking to a few ESL students who came into the pub and said that she was feeling so confident about her English until that moment because she didn't understand much of what we were saying. I think what happened is we were talking very fast and also we had abbreviated sentences because we both knew so much about the topic we were talking about so we actually missed some vital information that a listener would have needed to understand completely.

I'm so proud of them all and this weekend Marisol leaves us to go home to Barcelona. We will miss her and within the next week the rest of my students will begin leaving for the holidays. It's sad in a way but since I know I'll be off with Mom and Jean Marie to celebrate the holidays in Wales I won't get down for too long.

Because it was Marisol's last class the group bought me an adorable plush snow man who plays Christmas music and a box of chocolates. They also wrote me the most lovely card and on the envelope it said "To an American girl who got lost and Galway... Our favorite playwright." I truly adore them and am so grateful for all they've taught me and hopefully what I've taught them will be useful. Although, some of the vocabulary we came across I hope will remain unused. In the play of mine that we read about the husband who had an affair on his wife there are some not so nice words that are used by the wife as she expresses her dissatisfaction with her husbands behavior. Words like whore and slut. Now when I explained to my students what these words meant they jotted it all down in their notebooks and Vanessa even put next to whore "never use this word." I had to laugh because they're so funny sometimes especially Vanessa who has a wonderfully playful nature. Now each time we read the play my students got a big laugh out of when the wife's character would yelled explicitly at the husband screaming the word penis which she repeated multiple times. The husband in turn yells at her and says "Stop saying the word penis!" So in the card they gave me today my student's wrote, on the cover next to the big penguin and in a thought bubble, "Stop saying the word penis" and next to the little penguin they put in a thought bubble "penis, penis penis!" which was the wife's response in the play. How can you not love a group who are funny and loving all at the same time.

Also, Patricia had asked her sister, Tamara who had visited from Spain a week ago and who had joined us for Indian dinner while she was here, to bring me some of the famous curied ham from Spain. I was so excited when I opened the package to see what looked like one of my favorite foods, prosciutto. I look forward to having some this evening.

My other student, Halil, has been sick all week but I hope to resume lessons with him next week as I only have until the 23rd to help him out.

I met Jean Marie and mom at the Budding Cafe and it was so great to see her. We had dinner at a pizza place we like and then we went to the gym where we got warmed up in the jacuzzi and caught up on all the news from home.

We met a lovely women, Patricia in the locker room. She's a member at the gym and from Bilbao, Spain. She married an Irish man and now lives not far from the city center. It's funny but I think I've spent considerably more time with non-Irish people while I've been here than I have with the Irish folk. So strange.