I know I said no more posts, but the Sox won the Series. C´mon!
I actually got to see Game 3. As far as I know, I was at one of two bars in all of Madrid showing the game. It started at 2:30 AM, and I went to bed as my family was waking up. But nice game. Dice-K (Japanese import, starting pitcher) had two RBIs, which is one more than either ARod or Derek Jeter can boast.
But enough gloating.
Hector and Dario had me guilt-tripping all over myself tonight. "Quiero que no te vayas." "Por favor, quedate aquí." Hector drew me a picture, and Dario came into my room as I was packing to distract me with his airplanes.
Both had their own ways of saying goodbye. Hector played the "No I love you more" game, showing off his knowledge of outer space with, "Well, I love you from here to the galaxy!" Dario, on the other hand, tried to play with my heart. "No te quiero," he said. (I don´t love you.) "Pues, sí yo te quiero," he said, trying to get a rise out of me. (Well, I actually do love you.) He switched it back and forth a few more times. I assured them I´d only be gone two weeks.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
"Dude, I think he´s doing the dice thing too much." "That´s all he´s got."
It´s been awhile. I´ll give the footnotes.
The night after I saw Toronto lose to Real Madrid, I went clubbing with Britney, a girl from Canada and Austria, Erica, a girl from the US and Venezuela, and the Madrileños who I had watched the game with. It was good to combine groups.
If I knew how to dance, I might understand the attraction of a nightclub. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to dance, and my usual itinerary in a nightclub can only reasonably be stretched so long. I get a drink and chat a little, if the grating techno isn´t too loud.
Usually, I come into a club with a just slightly unrealistic idea of how incredible my dancing is, so at first I dance seriously. Crip-walk. Michael Jackson spin move this girl once taught me. A casual moonwalk, somewhere in the song. Something dreidel-like with the hands. I think I´m pretty cool, but eventually (a minute into the second song), I don´t know any more moves. I improvise, but I look more like I´m spazzing out than doing anything intentional.
At this point, it´s time to reference the part in "Knocked up" when Seth Rogen repeatedly does a dice-throwing routine to cover up for his lack of dancing ability. (Amazing how closely art imitates real life.) The dice-throwing routine leads to the ever-useful sprinkler routine. If you´re with cool people, they get into the imitations, and this kind of thing can last for a while. The night with Britney, Erica, and the Madrileños saw the lawn-mower, the shopper, the race-car-driver, and countless other classics.
Eventually, I can get into the dancing a little bit, even the non-jokey dancing. But one of the two best parts of a club is the sitting down and chatting...In other words, something that could be done much more easily at a bar.
The club is a similar but less intense version of a semi-formal afterparty. Clubbing is a weekly event, at least, so kids aren´t trying to pack a whole school-year´s worth of partying into one night. There´s more dancing, and less, um, promiscuousness (I´ll leave it at that). The biggest difference, though, is that people don´t know each other. At the nightclub, the friends you come with are usually the friends you stay with. The people on the dance floor might as well be eating lunch with their group at a restaurant -- that´s how little interaction there is between groups. At an afterparty, you´ll say hello to almost everyone you see, and interact with almost everyone you say hello to. Then again, you probably won´t meet anyone new at an afterparty. At a club, you meet tons of people, which is the other really good part of a club.
But to me, bar-hopping is the most enjoyable way to spend a night out. The two best parts of clubbing, chatting and meeting new people, are easier, better, and more fun in a bar. So there, clubbing.
I used to doubt the idea that children learn languages more easily than adults. The evidence often given, that a five year old speaks better Spanish than someone who has taken five years of Spanish classes in school, is a totally unfair comparison. The five-year-old is immersed, a situation clearly better than classes.
After about two month´s worth of teaching, I still have those doubts, but children clearly have some advantages. Pronunciation is the biggest. Hector (five years old) and Dario (three) can, on the first try, repeat a word back to me with nearly 100% correct pronunciation. Oscar, a Madrileño to whom I give private lessons, cannot eliminate his accent when pronouncing words even on the third or fourth try. And he often lapses back into his Castilian-tinted pronunciation if I ask for the word later in the lesson.
But my adult students seem to learn more quickly than the children I teach. They know how to concentrate on memorizing, which is a big part of learning a language. Adults have the same kind of advantage over children that they would if they were studying law, or biology, or history -- they know how to deal with lots of information, prioritize it, and memorize it.
That said, I am sometimes amazed with what Dario and Hector have internalized, such as Dario knowing a word I´ve taught only once or Hector picking up on the difference between "here" and "there." It could just be a matter of expectations -- I expect more of the adults I teach, so I am less blown away when they make these same kinds of leaps. But I feel a difference. The adults memorize words and concepts. The children internalize them. The adults will have to actively transform the memorization into second-nature, possibly in an immersion, as I am doing now. The children already operate as if the second language is second nature. Steffen, a German I know, learned English as a child, and now, after never being immersed in an English-speaking country, speaks perfect English. He learned it and internalized it at the same time. You can see that same-time learning happening in Dario and Hector. They use English words in otherwise Spanish sentences. "Quiero mi red car, por favor." It´s fascinating, and also really cute.
This post will be the last for two weeks, as I am taking a two-week trip to the states! I won a journalism award for an article I wrote last year, and the original reason I´m coming is for the journalism conference and awards ceremony (Harvard-Westlake is being unbelievably generous, helping me to get to Philadelphia, where the journalism conference is being held). As this trip will probably be my only time in the US this year, I decided to extend the time a little bit. The Vasquez´s, the family I´m staying with and teaching the kids in, said two weeks off would be fine. I´ll see friends, my grandparents, and my mom and her boyfriend Bill, who were coincidentally already coming to New York the weekend before the journalism conference. In two weeks, I´ll be back in Madrid, hopefully without missing a beat. But for now, the gap year´s on a two-week hiatus, and so is the blog.
The night after I saw Toronto lose to Real Madrid, I went clubbing with Britney, a girl from Canada and Austria, Erica, a girl from the US and Venezuela, and the Madrileños who I had watched the game with. It was good to combine groups.
If I knew how to dance, I might understand the attraction of a nightclub. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to dance, and my usual itinerary in a nightclub can only reasonably be stretched so long. I get a drink and chat a little, if the grating techno isn´t too loud.
Usually, I come into a club with a just slightly unrealistic idea of how incredible my dancing is, so at first I dance seriously. Crip-walk. Michael Jackson spin move this girl once taught me. A casual moonwalk, somewhere in the song. Something dreidel-like with the hands. I think I´m pretty cool, but eventually (a minute into the second song), I don´t know any more moves. I improvise, but I look more like I´m spazzing out than doing anything intentional.
At this point, it´s time to reference the part in "Knocked up" when Seth Rogen repeatedly does a dice-throwing routine to cover up for his lack of dancing ability. (Amazing how closely art imitates real life.) The dice-throwing routine leads to the ever-useful sprinkler routine. If you´re with cool people, they get into the imitations, and this kind of thing can last for a while. The night with Britney, Erica, and the Madrileños saw the lawn-mower, the shopper, the race-car-driver, and countless other classics.
Eventually, I can get into the dancing a little bit, even the non-jokey dancing. But one of the two best parts of a club is the sitting down and chatting...In other words, something that could be done much more easily at a bar.
The club is a similar but less intense version of a semi-formal afterparty. Clubbing is a weekly event, at least, so kids aren´t trying to pack a whole school-year´s worth of partying into one night. There´s more dancing, and less, um, promiscuousness (I´ll leave it at that). The biggest difference, though, is that people don´t know each other. At the nightclub, the friends you come with are usually the friends you stay with. The people on the dance floor might as well be eating lunch with their group at a restaurant -- that´s how little interaction there is between groups. At an afterparty, you´ll say hello to almost everyone you see, and interact with almost everyone you say hello to. Then again, you probably won´t meet anyone new at an afterparty. At a club, you meet tons of people, which is the other really good part of a club.
But to me, bar-hopping is the most enjoyable way to spend a night out. The two best parts of clubbing, chatting and meeting new people, are easier, better, and more fun in a bar. So there, clubbing.
I used to doubt the idea that children learn languages more easily than adults. The evidence often given, that a five year old speaks better Spanish than someone who has taken five years of Spanish classes in school, is a totally unfair comparison. The five-year-old is immersed, a situation clearly better than classes.
After about two month´s worth of teaching, I still have those doubts, but children clearly have some advantages. Pronunciation is the biggest. Hector (five years old) and Dario (three) can, on the first try, repeat a word back to me with nearly 100% correct pronunciation. Oscar, a Madrileño to whom I give private lessons, cannot eliminate his accent when pronouncing words even on the third or fourth try. And he often lapses back into his Castilian-tinted pronunciation if I ask for the word later in the lesson.
But my adult students seem to learn more quickly than the children I teach. They know how to concentrate on memorizing, which is a big part of learning a language. Adults have the same kind of advantage over children that they would if they were studying law, or biology, or history -- they know how to deal with lots of information, prioritize it, and memorize it.
That said, I am sometimes amazed with what Dario and Hector have internalized, such as Dario knowing a word I´ve taught only once or Hector picking up on the difference between "here" and "there." It could just be a matter of expectations -- I expect more of the adults I teach, so I am less blown away when they make these same kinds of leaps. But I feel a difference. The adults memorize words and concepts. The children internalize them. The adults will have to actively transform the memorization into second-nature, possibly in an immersion, as I am doing now. The children already operate as if the second language is second nature. Steffen, a German I know, learned English as a child, and now, after never being immersed in an English-speaking country, speaks perfect English. He learned it and internalized it at the same time. You can see that same-time learning happening in Dario and Hector. They use English words in otherwise Spanish sentences. "Quiero mi red car, por favor." It´s fascinating, and also really cute.
This post will be the last for two weeks, as I am taking a two-week trip to the states! I won a journalism award for an article I wrote last year, and the original reason I´m coming is for the journalism conference and awards ceremony (Harvard-Westlake is being unbelievably generous, helping me to get to Philadelphia, where the journalism conference is being held). As this trip will probably be my only time in the US this year, I decided to extend the time a little bit. The Vasquez´s, the family I´m staying with and teaching the kids in, said two weeks off would be fine. I´ll see friends, my grandparents, and my mom and her boyfriend Bill, who were coincidentally already coming to New York the weekend before the journalism conference. In two weeks, I´ll be back in Madrid, hopefully without missing a beat. But for now, the gap year´s on a two-week hiatus, and so is the blog.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
The NBA gets worldly
A Madrileño who I met on the town´s basketball court a few days ago invited me to watch the big game tonight with him and a few friends. The big game pitted the NBA´s own Toronto Raptors against the Spanish league´s Real Madrid.
Three guesses who won?
Go with the logical answer and you´ll be wrong every time.
Real Madrid beat the Raptors.
The final score was 104-103, but the numbers were a little closer than reality, as Toronto hit a meaningless three at the last second.
To be fair, the Raptors were missing their biggest star, Chris Bosh. Still, an NBA team losing to a Spanish league team?
Gut instinct says that´s unprecedented.
It´s not so unprecedented. Just this month the Memphis Grizzlies lost a close one to Unicaja 102-99. (Both Memphis and Toronto have two players each from Spain. Like Yao Ming´s Rockets, huge in China, these teams are big draws here.) And last year, the Philadelphia 76ers lost 104-99 to Sant Jordi (see Memphis link).
It´s not all bad news for the NBA, though. After their loss at Unicaja, Memphis dismantled the Spanish League team Estudiantes later in the month.
Also, these are pre-season games, so even when the NBA teams do field full line-ups, the players aren´t going full-bore.
But Spain has proven something basic -- its teams are competitive with at least the middle of the NBA pack.
Tonight, three Spanish boys crowded around a TV where national pride hung in the balance. And all across Madrid, all across Spain, similar scenes played out around other TVs.
Imagine the market for the NBA if it that N for "National" became an "I." Imagine the excitement that kind of expansion would create back here in the states, and all around the world.
Why not?
Three guesses who won?
Go with the logical answer and you´ll be wrong every time.
Real Madrid beat the Raptors.
The final score was 104-103, but the numbers were a little closer than reality, as Toronto hit a meaningless three at the last second.
To be fair, the Raptors were missing their biggest star, Chris Bosh. Still, an NBA team losing to a Spanish league team?
Gut instinct says that´s unprecedented.
It´s not so unprecedented. Just this month the Memphis Grizzlies lost a close one to Unicaja 102-99. (Both Memphis and Toronto have two players each from Spain. Like Yao Ming´s Rockets, huge in China, these teams are big draws here.) And last year, the Philadelphia 76ers lost 104-99 to Sant Jordi (see Memphis link).
It´s not all bad news for the NBA, though. After their loss at Unicaja, Memphis dismantled the Spanish League team Estudiantes later in the month.
Also, these are pre-season games, so even when the NBA teams do field full line-ups, the players aren´t going full-bore.
But Spain has proven something basic -- its teams are competitive with at least the middle of the NBA pack.
Tonight, three Spanish boys crowded around a TV where national pride hung in the balance. And all across Madrid, all across Spain, similar scenes played out around other TVs.
Imagine the market for the NBA if it that N for "National" became an "I." Imagine the excitement that kind of expansion would create back here in the states, and all around the world.
Why not?
Monday, October 8, 2007
What´s up? What´s up? We don´t have houses
Housing is a big issue in Madrid. Half of "kids" under 35 still live with their parents, and the average age of "emancipation" is even higher in Madrid. Part of the reason is culture, but another part is the ridiculously high price of reasonable living in Spain (say the Madrileños I met at the protest).
The President is trying to encourage citizens to rent more. That wasn´t enough for the protesters.
They waved Cuban flags (in an exercise of stupidity that reminded me of the immigrants rights marchers waving Mexican flags) and Republic of Spain flags (the Republic that existed before Franco was moderate-left, not Communist, but Republicans allied with Communist to fight Franco´s Nationalists in the Civil War, so the flag has become a symbol of Communism).
The protesters wanted the government to build low-cost housing. That well-intentioned idea would probably do harm, in my opinion. The US government has undertaken such projects -- they usually become the worst areas of any neighborhood (ever heard Dr. Dre rap about living in "The Projects"?). No one really owns the homes, and, without real ownership, the buildings are neglected.
The protesters also talked about government fixing of rent rates. Pretty short-sighted. That kind of move would discourage home-owners from renting their homes, so those that did benefit from lower prices would be a lucky few. Most people would be worse off.
The protesters best idea was embodied in a sign that read "Casas sin gente y tú sin casa - acaba €speculación." (In English: "Houses without people and you without a house - end speculation.") The protesters´ suggestion was to impose high taxes on owners of houses without people living in them. Seems interesting. If you think that maximizing living space serves more good for society than speculation, even if to maximize the space you need to interfere with market forces, this tax is for you. It encourages owners to use their houses as homes.
The protest itself was fun. Protesters met at la Puerta de Sol (imagine the Santa Monica Promenade in downtown LA). I estimate about 3,000 people were there, and another few thousand watched. I chanted along with everyone else. "¿Qué pasa, qué pasa? ¡No tenemos casa!" (English: "What´s up, what´s up? We don´t have houses!")
I´ve been meeting a lot of people, most through the Spanish school. About half are Germans, a country that has the best combination of high population, proximity to Spain, and tradition of learning languages other their own (unlike, say, France). The other half are Dutch, Austrian, Canadian, and French. And I meet locals, too, mostly on the bus or the metro.
Nightlife is often bar-hopping. This Saturday, though, I persuaded the people I was with that we needed to hang out in the forest near my house. Exploring the forest - that´s nightlife.
The President is trying to encourage citizens to rent more. That wasn´t enough for the protesters.
They waved Cuban flags (in an exercise of stupidity that reminded me of the immigrants rights marchers waving Mexican flags) and Republic of Spain flags (the Republic that existed before Franco was moderate-left, not Communist, but Republicans allied with Communist to fight Franco´s Nationalists in the Civil War, so the flag has become a symbol of Communism).
The protesters wanted the government to build low-cost housing. That well-intentioned idea would probably do harm, in my opinion. The US government has undertaken such projects -- they usually become the worst areas of any neighborhood (ever heard Dr. Dre rap about living in "The Projects"?). No one really owns the homes, and, without real ownership, the buildings are neglected.
The protesters also talked about government fixing of rent rates. Pretty short-sighted. That kind of move would discourage home-owners from renting their homes, so those that did benefit from lower prices would be a lucky few. Most people would be worse off.
The protesters best idea was embodied in a sign that read "Casas sin gente y tú sin casa - acaba €speculación." (In English: "Houses without people and you without a house - end speculation.") The protesters´ suggestion was to impose high taxes on owners of houses without people living in them. Seems interesting. If you think that maximizing living space serves more good for society than speculation, even if to maximize the space you need to interfere with market forces, this tax is for you. It encourages owners to use their houses as homes.
The protest itself was fun. Protesters met at la Puerta de Sol (imagine the Santa Monica Promenade in downtown LA). I estimate about 3,000 people were there, and another few thousand watched. I chanted along with everyone else. "¿Qué pasa, qué pasa? ¡No tenemos casa!" (English: "What´s up, what´s up? We don´t have houses!")
I´ve been meeting a lot of people, most through the Spanish school. About half are Germans, a country that has the best combination of high population, proximity to Spain, and tradition of learning languages other their own (unlike, say, France). The other half are Dutch, Austrian, Canadian, and French. And I meet locals, too, mostly on the bus or the metro.
Nightlife is often bar-hopping. This Saturday, though, I persuaded the people I was with that we needed to hang out in the forest near my house. Exploring the forest - that´s nightlife.
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