Lingue e Sport 2008

On Monday I started my second year teaching at Lingue e Sport, a two- week program for kids. We teach them three hours of languages in the morning and in the afternoon they got a huge sports program.

I am soooooooo lucky!! I asked for the English class this year and got them! I got eight kids, who are all very very well behaved and interested in learning English. It is basically a breeze going through three hours there. Last year I taught German at Lingue e Sport and got 18 students, among them three brats who in the end were kicked out of the program for smoking drugs and other stunts.

Tomorrow we're going on the all-day trip to Osogna. I'm also happy with that, because last year we went up into the mountains where it was freezing cold. There's a waterfall at Osogna and since we're asked to bring our swimsuits, I think we're going to go swimming in the afternoon! How cool is that?

Speaking of English- I also got a long letter and a beautiful foto from Caitlin!

On the sad side of life- I gave up a Paul Simon concert to help my apartment-mate's family with the party at Vigera. Well, it wasn't so sad after all. It's only that Beth would kill me if she knew... :P Anyway, it was for a good cause- we sold tickets for a lottery and thus gained some money to restaurate(?) the church. I also sold quite a few tickets to the monk who usually does the mass at Vigera.

Anyway, I'm heading off to the lake now. Poor Sylvana and Olli, when they were here, it rained quite a bit. But we managed to squeeze in some time at the lake when the sun was shining.

Le persiane

Bellinzona is a real windy place and right now the "persiane" (foto) are battering against the house with the wind. If I ever leave this place I will miss the sound of that.

You cannot only open and close them but you also need to fix them because of the wind. On the outside with the little things to the right and the left of the photo, usually in the form of little heads (love them!!), and on the inside it's a bit more complicated. You need to fix an iron rod and that then gets fixed with another little piece of iron. Still, when it gets really windy they batter against the house, which can be annoying if someone in the house just forgot to fix them, because then it's real loud.

They are, however real useful in the summer, because you can close them and fix them and leave the window open so that the air can enter but nothing else... I guess that's also the reason why they are almost exclusively found in the South of Europe. A lot of people also close them around midday...

Wow, my English is definitely on the slope down... as my Italian is getting better and better... I now had the first "experience" that I used to have with English when I began to really speak well (well, that's in the past!!)-- using intuitively words that I hear but that I never actively learned, like I suddenly began saying "Son stanca" instead of "Sono stanca." (I'm tired.) In fact I do not hear anyone pronounce the "o" in "sono"... I've always loved arriving at that stage of language learning. Well, and I admit I now like Italian much better than English, sorry guys...

Ma daiiiiiii

Il altro giorno a Lugano, a H & M: Entra una americana e va alla cassa con un ombrello e dice: "This is broken."
La comessa la guarda strana e dice qualcosa come non puo fare niente.
La americana dice ancora una volta: "But this is broken!"
La comessa che obviamente non capisce bene l'inglese dice che le dispiace e dice ciao al prossimo cliente.
La americana si gira con la faccia tutta come "ma questi maledetti Italiani" ed esce.
La comessa dice alla altra comessa: "Ma lei ha detto che era rotto?"
Poi, pochi minuti dopo rientra la americana con una amica che adesso va alla stessa comessa e dice: "This is broken. I just bought this here five minutes ago."
La comessa questa volta capisce e inizia a fare tutta la prozedura per ritornare l'ombrello. (Fa anche qualcosa sbagliato perchè adesso è nervosa...)
La amica della americana dice: "See, I told you, just don't say excuse me or anything, just tell them!"
Purtroppo lo dice con un tono cosi superiore che io mi giro e dice: "They just didn't understand, is all."

Uffa. Come fai lamentarti quando loro non ti capiscono perchè non parli italiano? Sul serio io mi vergonerei!!! C'erano tante altre cose che volevo dirgle ma per fortuna mi fa fatica parlare in inglese e mi vengono tutte le parole in italiano. Si, so che il mio italiano non è perfetto. Ma non andrei mai in un negozio lamentandomi a voce alta in tedesco. Anche se il tedesco si capisce qui...

My head knows...

So now that I have taught for a full month I will have a supervised lesson tomorrow, uffa... They do that every four weeks to insure that the quality of the lessons don't diminuish. In theory that's a good thing if only it didn't make me so nervous!!! I finally felt quite comfortable in the classroom and quite enjoyed teaching and my adrenaline level didn't quite get up so high any more but I already slept less well tonight and I keep thinking of revising my lesson plan for tomorrow worrying that it is too short or too much repetition etc... I hate when I do that because all the feedback I have had so far has been absolutely positive and my students have told me several times that they are quite happy with the way I teach. So there's really no reason at all to get anxious or to worry. A classical case of "my head knows but my emotions are stronger"...

Well, my parents will arrive on Friday and they will stay until Monday! The weather's supposed to be sunny but not as great as it has been. I'm up at Vigera right now and Sunday we did an hour or two climbing the river bed of the Ticino, which is still pretty small up here (the source is in the mountains of St. Gottardo) and runs in a sort of a canyon. We found some rocks that seem to be fossils and lots of sandy beaches and fish. Yesterday we went for a hike up to Carì, through pine woods and rocky fields and little huts and fountains. I got so tanned up here I can't imagine getting any more tanned in summer!!!

Anyway, later we will return to Bellinzona and Nico's aunt will bring her bunny which will stay with us for two weeks because she is moving to another house. Today I also had an email from my penpal Marta. She writes to me in German and I write her in Italian and we help each other correcting mistakes and learning about the other's culture. She is from Rome but lives at Florence. Writing in English I keep thinking that soon I will need a tandem partner who speaks English because I can definitely see how my English deteriorates. I used to be able to speak and write like I did in German but now it's really difficult not to use Italian grammar and words...

Delitto di mezza estate

Sto leggendo "Delitto di mezza estate" di Henning Mankell e mi piace tanto questo autore svedese. Naturalmente non leggo i suoi libri come ognuno altro. Leggo e cerco di capire un po' dalla cultura svedese. Mi intressano ancora tanto queste piccole differenze. In questo modo sono anch'io un commissario che spera di trovare evidenze. E ora leggo anche per imparare l'italiano. Ho trovato che legere tanto in una lingua straniera ti aiuta tantissimo. Non ti rendi neanche conto quanto impari quando leggi ma poco dopo quando parli ti vengono tutte queste esspressione che hai letto. E non hai neanche bisogno di studiarle. Poi, scrivo le parole che davvero non capisco (neanche dal contesto) sulle schedine e dopo imparo. Mi meraviglia ancora come sono simile l'italiano e l'inglese. L'italiano mi sembra un inglese con la grammatica tedesca e una cantilena piu' bella. Pero' davvero è contrario, prima c'era l'italiano e dopo l'inglese... e solo perchè le ho studiato sbagliato. Si deve davvero studiare prima la lingua piu' vecchia...

Geht doch!

Heute vom Pruefungsamt gehoert, das Zeugnis sollte jetzt in ein bis zwei Wochen doch endlich ankommen. Hab auch meine Endnote erfahren was mit ner eins vorne dran!! Yay!!! Spring durchs Zimmer!! Ich bin dem boesen Zweierfluch entkommen!!

Heute auch wieder Berwerbungsgespraech gehabt in Lugano in einem ziemlich zugigen Hotel (zitter). Das hat zwei Stunden gedauert und ich musste auch ein bisschen Englisch unterrichten. Zum Glueck hat mein Gehirn das diesmal kapiert und kein Misch-Masch aus Italienisch und Englisch gesendet. Nur als ich dann wieder auf Deutsch wechseln wollte, hab ich aus Versehen Italienisch geredet. Uffa!

Ohhh, und in vier Wochen kommt schon die Anke, freuuuuuu!! Und danach meine Eltern. Und danach hoffentlich noch die Sylvana, die Birte, die Isabel, die Caitlin... noch wer Lust?

Diving into pages

As I am sitting here typing, I feel that inner tugging that you get when you have a real good book waiting for you to be continued. Reading is one of my greatest passions. I just love to dive down into other worlds (not just in fiction, obviously) and explore.

I think it was last year that I tried to keep track of how many books I read every year. For two or three months I meticulously wrote down every book I had read but then it got all muddled up because of all the stuff I was reading for my tesis.

I remember when I was a teenager I got so annoyed that books were so short. I would read a book of 500 pages in two hours. Later I began to read almost exclusively in English. At least that would take me a couple of hours longer. I'd say that now I am just as fast reading in English as in German so the next thing to do is read in Italian, which at the moment is still a bit tiring and a lot of times I'm not up to it because for me reading is all about the pictures in my head. If I read too slow it's like a film that doesn't move.

But then reading is not just about the speed. It's about imagination about getting lost, forgetting where you are. Seeing the impossible, getting to know people who do not esist but seem so real, learning things you never knew before. And now I'm returning to read "The Oxford Murders" a book that is about mathematics, logic and philosophia and at the same time a crime story which I'm already in love with!!

Quaranta

Ok, here's something that's really scary. Lately I went to Zurigo and there were two girls who looked kind of lost at the stamp vending machine. They spoke English and for those who don't know it I used to travel to the US every summer for quite some years and in the end I felt absolutely no difference between expressing myself in English or German, in fact people used to believe that I was from another part of the US and didn't even realize that what little had remained of my accent was foreign. I used to be so proud of having learned English so well after my teachers at school had told me I had absolutely no talent for learning languages. (In fact I had to repeat 7th grade because of-- tadaaahhh, English and Latin--how ironic is that???)...

However, so there I was with those two kind of lost-looking girls whose every word I understood and I asked them "Can I help you?" Oh, they were sooo relieved and grateful because all the explanation on the vending machine was in German, French and Italian but then I wanted to explain to them how it works. So I stood there and I wanted to tell them that shipping a letter to South Africa was 1,40 CHF. But, ohhhhhhhh!!! I got so far as to tell them it was "one". Of course I had no clue what CHF is in English and that really didn't bother me, I simply said "franchi" like they say in Italian. But then I wanted to say 40. And, can you believe it? A enormously HUUUUUUUUUUGE "QUARANTA" was written all over my brain. I think I blushed. Desperately, in my head I began to count "ten, twenty, thirty..." but then there was the

QUARANTA

again. I swear, I was completely, utterly, helplessly unable to say "forty". I didn't not only remember "forty", it even felt as if "forty" had never been saved on my hard drive. I wanted to die of shame right there... Then, it got even worse, I wanted to explain why I was having problems speaking English when I first sounded like a native speaker and I could not for the life of me remember the word "learning". Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, aiutooooo! What is happening to me? Also, whenever I talk to someone on the phone, no matter if it is in English or German, I cannot refrain from saying "si" instead of "yes" or "ja". Is it possible to lose a language? But then how strange is it that I can still write in English but speaking don't work? And how am I going to teach English when I am apparently losing it? Hellllllll---p!!!!

Verbania

Allora... heute sind wir mal rechts am Lago Maggiore langgefahren bis Verbania (It). Ma ohhhhh, che bello!!! Durch den Nebel schien der See wie ein endloses Meer obwohl man die Berge am anderen Ufer noch sehen konnte. Alles schien irgendwie transparent und unwirklich. Die Strasse war eng und zwischen Felswand und See eingequetscht und wenn ein Bus kam dachte man, "Incidente!" Und dann Verbania, enge Gassen und Passagen, Boegengaenge und Innenhoefe und oh, ja, die obligatorische bunte Waesche, die auf eine Schnur gespannt zwischen den Fenstern baumelt.

Ecco, es gibt sogar eine Schule fuer Englisch in Verbania. Ich werde da auf jeden Fall mal fragen wegen Arbeit. Gestern habe ich von einem Lehrer gehoert, dass in Ticino viele Sprachlehrer besonders fuer Englisch und Deutsch gesucht werden. Mal sehen wo ich naechstes Jahr lande...