Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Category: Personal

Spanish verbs

You just have to love the Spanish culture. Today we started learning verbs by playing charades. Some of the verbs the school deems essential in the @Nivel Principiante 1 Unidades de 1-7:-

eructar – to belch
orinar – to urinate
vomitar – to vomit
amar – to love
estornudar – to sneeze

I was given the task to mime eructar and poor Sandra at to mime orinar and construct a sentence using it!!

after much help I constructed the sentence :
yo trago agua cuando nado (I swallowed water when swimming)

Tonight I have 5 A4 pages of verbs to work through before class starts at 1.15pm tomorrow.

Geoff estudiante

After yesterdays fun trip along the coast to Corillo “yo monto la bicicleta” with Kerry who is also lodging with Nuria

Today was the start of Geoff as the “estudiante” after a very brief test at 7am I was, surprisingly, assigned to the beginners class 🙂

Wow! Nelson our teacher doesn’t speak ANY English in class so it’s real immersion. In my class of 6 there is Margaret an English GP (whose husbands blood pressure has dropped whilst she and her dog have been away! The dog returns later this week..)
Two Swiss German girls Sandra & Caroline – Caroline was my class amiga and pushed me along. Maiete from Holland and Rebecca.

It was straight into “la presentación personal” ” Yo me llamo Geoff, Mi apellido es Jones, Yo Vivo en Cambridge, Yo soy de inglaterra,etc etc
Then we had to do an introduction of our class amiga. Followed by going through the alphabet & fonètica bàsica.

No wonder my head hurt. But not so much because I signed up for two weeks at the Sàmara Language school and maybe if I still enjoy it for another couple of weeks.

This evening it was intensive salsa lessons, really great as it was given by a guy so I could easily follow his steps.

The atomsphere is great and everyone is so friendly if only I could say hija (sorry Emily that wretched j does me in).

Now for those 3 pages of homework to do 🙁 before tomorrows class.

Iphone internet access

As wonderful as the iPhone is you still need a connection to the outside world.

Here in Samara there are a couple of Internet places offering wifi at 1000 colones per hour (about £1.50) not sure how they define an hour for a mobile device!

Or maybe I could use the local I.C.E mobile operator although it’s not showing an Edge or 3G connectivity on the iPhone display and anyway O2 would want at least £6 per MB.

Which leaves trying to find some altruistic person leaving their wifi open. So far I’ve found two, both hotels. I was kicked out of the first one whilst trying to buy a drink for 3000 colones which I thought was a bit weird as I would happily promote his hotel for free, PR which would be priceless – alas not to be 🙁
The second hotel I will wait and see….

It strikes me there is a need for an open wifi system that only allows iPhones to access – since the iPhone ( in the form sold by Apple) is really only a low usage user. so places could display an apple to show they are iPhone friendly.

Time to go sniffing this time for dinner!!

I can recommend the wifitrak application by the way to sniff out networks.

Local life

Had an incredible nights sleep on my boardlike bed, the secret is a quick shower then straight to bed so the latent heat of vaporization cools you down. It’s great to be woken by the squealer birds, just wish I wasn’t so stiff when I woke up. Need to do my pilates again. I visited the local Pilates place here but with all the free weights around, didn’t look like my kinda place.

I really love exploring new places, and could easily live here for awhile, just wish I could speak the local lingo, although my sign language & smile usually gets me what I want.

The town is not busy today, Good Friday is obviously a big deal here, although it was a very motley group parading behind the cross! So maybe it isn’t the religious centre of Costa Rica!

Today I’m meeting up with Evelyne & Mathias from Switzerland who sold up and have been touring the old British Dominions since January. Would be rather neat as a package tour concept. Tour the red bits of The World,. My Britanica 1890 edition would be ideal as the tour guide 🙂

Finished my Cafe Negro (not cafe solo here) so back to the beach.

I’m using the iPhone WordPress application in offline mode, just had major system lockup trying to attach an image 🙁

Thrown out of the original hotel, the owner refused to sell as drinks and switched the wifi off!!

Found another open link now – this time will keep it’s location secret 🙂