We watched the Life Of Brian on Netflix the other day (what? not Christmas-ey enough?) - mostly because Susan had never seen it before, but also for the scene half way through where Brian's Latin is corrected. Spanish isn't quite that bad, although I'm now learning more grammar, so imperatives and subjunctives are cropping up disturbingly often. There was a language exchange thing on in an Irish bar in Miraflores tonight. It wasn't terribly Irish (no Guinness on draught, but also no "antique" street signs or shamrocks), and I had stage-fright going in, but we put on little flag-badges to say which languages we wanted to speak, ordered a couple of drinks, and struck up a conversation. This worked remarkably well: not only was it the first time I'd managed to say something in Spanish longer than dos cervezas por favor without either getting terribly confused or the other person switching into English, but I think we actually made ourselves mostly understood. Of course there was a lot of umming and ahing - it's interesting how often I use words like "because" and "so...", and also how hard they are to remember when you're on the spot. Also, it's interesting that they started to come out in French after the second beer. The word of the day is chela - apparently this works for "a beer" from Mexico to Peru. In Chile, of course, they have different words: a draft beer is a schop there. It seems (to me, at least) to be much easier to be a bit flowery in Spanish: Susan was asking about Peruvian slang terms tonight, and I wanted to know whether a new word had negative connotations. When you can't remember how to say "bad" it's sometimes easier to bust out peyorativo and hope it doesn't sound too weird. And finally, here's Eddie Izzard talking about how silly Latin is.
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