Wednesday, 7 September 2011

If You Don't Know What To Talk About, Talk Shit

Hello! 

I realised that I should probably start these blogs with some sort of a greeting, since not all of you will have followed this blog from the start. I think that the best thing we learned today had to be the cultural aspect that when the Catalans don't know what to say, they talk about shit. Literally. When it comes around to Christmas time here, the children are given logs in school, which they paint and give a face to. They then take these logs home to "feed" them oranges. After a while, these logs are getting fatter and the night before Christmas, Christmas eve, the logs are covered with cloths and the children gather round their log to sing a song and hit it with something...then they uncover the log and they receive presents. This log is called Cago Téo in Catalan and the English translation is a "shitting log", which was quite funny for us to learn today. There are some strange traditions here in Catalonia. 

Apart from this, I'm ashamed to say that Conny, Tom and I didn't make the most of this lesson because it was so hot and boring in that big room. I think that we probably still came away with some good information, but productive things like this, happened instead. 



We learned quite a lot of Catalan today in the four hour lesson, still covering the basics ranging from months to time. Time is a difficult concept in Catalan because like the Germans they prefer to look ahead to the next hour when talking about time. So it would be as if we were to say it's a quarter of one, and that would be quarter past 12 and so on. Very interesting but a little difficult to grasp really. 

We went for another really long walk today after lessons, but this time to the other side of Girona, past the old town and even venturing into the next area. And also realised when we got to our destination that the shop didn't really have what we were looking for. We had seen a Carrefour on the way there though, and since I know that in France they have practically everything in them, I suggested we go in to see if there were any bikes, and it turns out there were. Hoorah for Carrefour! 

Tomorrow we have more Catalan classes and hopefully less walking to do!
Ciao :) x

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