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Language lessons and datadump

3/9/2018

3 Comments

 
We've now been in Barcelona for a whole week, which was mostly spent sleeping and reading until getting off our collective arses and heading to a language school this morning to enrol for two weeks of Spanish lessons. So we're now a few hundred Euros lighter in the pocket and, in exchange, will be carrying around several kilos of shiny textbooks every weekday. Oh, and they come with these shiny coaster things that apparently have sound stored on them: how retro!

We're lucky enough to have a six-person class: one third Chinese, one third Swedish, and one third us. I managed to fight off the urge to try to be "helpful" in Mandarin with the counting for the first session, and then quickly gave up. It's hard enough to throw a ball around a group of people while counting backwards from 20 in any language, but having to learn new numbers and to say ¡Hola! whenever you get to a number that's divisible by three - I think our teacher may have just been making it hard while filling in the last ten minutes. Of course, though, there's a little place around the corner where you can get a beer and some croquetas to make the walk home easier.

Data of note - I'm not sure whether I'll be able to turn this into some sort of infographic or whether it just makes me look like an obsessive, but I've been thinking about how to quantify our time, and so here are some metrics:
  • Days since last curry: zero. Didn't dare to go out for a Ruby here so I whipped a chicken-brinjal thing together
  • Steps up to front door in Barcelona: between 76 and 78, but never the same count twice in a row
  • Anchovies eaten: one in the first eight weeks (a really good one, in the Fish Shop in Dublin); now tending towards infinity since arriving in Spain
  • Ramen expeditions: one really disappointing in Ireland, where they didn't actually cook the noodles; one slightly less disappointing than (pretty low) expectations in Barcelona
  • Euros to the Singapore dollar: somewhere between a moderate rip-off and completely obscene, but indeterminable unless you can do mental arithmetic to four d.p.s while your camarero waits for you to decide which button to click on the credit card machine. Unless you're trying to exchange anything in Gatwick: I think I saw a 3,700 pip spread quoted there on GBPEUR: are there no laws against this kind of thing?
  • Days since last actually-good Asian meal: 19. (New Loon Fung on Gerrard St)
3 Comments
E@L link
4/9/2018 02:02:32 am

Caught up with Isabella yet?

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Tom
4/9/2018 10:13:00 pm

Twice: last Wednesday and tonight! We found a bottle of wine that’s expensive enough for you to get when you come here.

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ACG
6/9/2018 12:13:39 am

Serious advice time. Do not even bother to look for ramen outside of Asia. Singapore is the only place I have had anything that could even be fairly described as ramen outside of Japan. You are good people, you do not need to punish yourself for our amusement ;-)

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