Three hundred cool points go to the first person to name the song quoted in the entry title. As you have no doubt noticed, I haven´t updated this blog for nearly a month. I´ve been busy...ON VACATION!
Montevideo shuts down from Christmas to Carnaval, and so it is oh-so-Uruguayan to celebrate the holidays and then get out of Dodge for a while. Accordingly, I did just that. I had easily the most multilingual Christmas Eve of my life at Wilma´s house, and what a crowd we were - Wilma and her husband and kids, Julia (a retired Valdense pastor without family in the city), Kirsten and her mom and cousin, Dorothea, and for a while, Daniel and his wife (other friends from the Iglesia Valdense). This mix created a few language challenges - Wilma doesn´t speak much English, Álvaro and the kids speak some English (Karin speaks quite well, actually), KD´s family speaks no Spanish, but they do speak some German, which Doro, Wilma, and Álvaro speak. Accordingly, we had conversations like:
Wilma - "¿Están disfrutando el primer día en Uruguay?"
KD´s family - -looks at KD-
KD - Are you enjoying the first day in Uruguay?
KD´s mom - -Ja, sehr gut! (Or something Germanic like that).
This only got better as the night went on, as KD and I played translator for about everyone else at the table at least once. Julia and I then spoke French for a while, and when I blanked on the word for train platform in Spanish (it´s ánden, for the record), I asked Wilma for the word in Italian since she also speaks Italian, and for whatever reason I could remember "binario" (and also "voie" in French), but not "ánden." It was like the U.N., except fun.
Language issues were less tricky on Christmas Day at Milton´s house. He and his wife and adorable little son (18 months-ish) just moved into a new house in Carrasco Norte, so this was our first visit to his place. Milton speaks English, French, and German in addition to Spanish, so language issues did not involve committees or three-way translations, though I did spend 30 minutes or so translating Milton´s account of Uruguayan history into English for KD´s family...I learned quite a lot in the process. Did you know, for example, that Uruguay granted women´s suffrage over a decade before the U.S., and that it wrote in an official separation of church and state into its constitution in 1830? This country has been progressive by about any political standards from the get-go. After the history lesson, we moved on to the big family dinner with Milton´s parents and various in-laws; dinner was filled with laughter, stories, and (I won´t lie) free scotch. Fun was had, and a nap was definitely taken afterwards.
The 26th continued the festivities; we had our team Christmas party at La Obra, complete with lechón (suckling pig) roasted up for us. We´d been given "amigos secretos" to get gifts for. This year, I decided to make my Christmas gifts rather than buy them, and so Doro received a coupon redeemable for a free three-course dinner, prepared by moi in "La Cocina Fea" (the ugly kitchen...our kitchen in the church is like something out of a horror movie). My secret friend, Virginia (the social worker, not the one in Centro de Estudios) had drawn my name, and got me a book- La Borra del Café by Mario Benedetti.
The book came in handy for the next phase of my Christmas vacation, but to find out about that, you´ll have to tune in next time!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment