We awoke at midday and went to pay for our room. The landlady who usually scowled at us was surprisingly friendly, cheerfully commenting on our escapade last night as she gave us a mound of one centavo coins in our change. There are 100 centavos to a Guatemalan Quetzal.
We went for breakfast and a fruitless search for a scrubbing brush in the market. I also posted some mail, once again getting a vast number of huge stamps, in excess of the available space on my postcards.
Yesterday when we were in the plaza commenting on the banality of local music Paul said “Belgium won the Eurovision Song Contest last year. I was so ashamed. That’s why I am here”! He is a hard drinking, hard smoking Rock Fan from Antwerp.
In Belgium they have a great scheme whereby you can leave your job for a year for up to five years and receive unemployment benefit, while an unemployed person does your job for the period that you are away. Paul was a postman back in Antwerp.
Back at the hotel Spanish/Latin music is playing loudly as we await our first Spanish lessons. We bought an exercise book each for only 38 centavos. The afternoon passed quickly and at 16:00 hrs. we waited outside for Lety, our Spanish teacher. I had not heard the name Lety before, but apparently it is a girl’s name meaning is joy or happiness, and it is most commonly given to Dutch girls.
At 16:20 hrs. we had given up hope of her arriving and went back to our room to read our books. She finally appeared at 16:35 hrs. and started with Declan’s lesson. Declan was a beginner, but I had been taking Spanish lessons at night classes in Feltham in England. We took on too much by trying to do a two-year course in one year. I failed the O-Level, but most of the class got unclassified. Only a woman who could speak fluent Italian passed the exam.
We went on to do GCSE Spanish and a year later I got a Grade 1 pass. One fellow on our course was a local oaf who was preparing to go to Spain on a package holiday. When we were learning how to ask for things in a shop, he asked “why don’t we just say “deme” (give me) and point to the fucking thing”?
Meanwhile I read my book for a while and then went down to the communal kitchen to make coffee. Our neighbour, a Canadian lady, was cooking her evening meal. When her roommate suggested it had been cooking for long enough, she replied “no, leave it a bit longer. I want to boil the shit out of those amoebas”!
My Spanish lesson began at about 18:30 hrs. and we began by practicing my rusty preterite (past) tense. In Spanish, the preterite (often spelled "preterit") verb tense expresses an action that took place at a definite time in the past. It is contrasted with the imperfect tense, which expresses an action that took place at an indefinite time or has not yet been completed.
At 20:00 hrs. we skipped eating and went straight to Mio Cid’s where we had a lively evening with Paul, Bridgette, Byrn, Pedro “The Fly”, a Swede and the Norwegian journalist who hit the Cuba Libres with a vengeance.
At midnight we moved to another bar just down the road, talking in the dim interior until 02:00 hrs. when we went back for an “early night”. Bridgette seemed quite enamoured with Pedro and they went off cuddling each other. Our hotel manager was on hand to let us in.
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