After our exciting scuba excursion yesterday, Bill and I decided to camp out in the apartment this morning rather than do an activity. We were going to swim, but the pool was closed for maintenance. I had difficult homework anyway, so it was just as well that we didn’t go out.
We had some problems with class this afternoon. The school switched Bill’s teacher, and they ran out of classroom space for us so we both ended up at different cafes for our lessons. The results for Bill were not good. I’m including his post here since it’s not that long. Here it is:
22 July 2019 20:18
Week two of Spanish did not start well. They switch my instructor from Karen to Michelle. Michelle does not speak much English and what she does it is very broken and hard to understand. Nothing was explained to me, Karen introduced me to Michelle and said she was going to be my teacher this week. Then Michelle asked me to follow her and she took me out of the building and a fair distance from the school to a cafe that had music in the background. She was busy on her phone and during the walk and at the cafe she was saying she was sorry and that she had worries and gesturing to her phone. I had a lot of trouble understanding her and there was nobody that could help me so I told her I was done and we went back to the school. There, it seemed that everyone who could speak English was teaching. So, I caught a cab and came back to the apartment. At some point, they let Emily know I had left early. Her instructor told her they had a lot of students this week, there were no classrooms available, and that the private lessons were moved to off site locations. I’m not sure I like that as I have a hard enough time hearing and understanding. I may have to revert to my CDs and DouLingo.
After Emily got back we went down to the trendy neighborhood and had dinner. We got to see some street performers and walked around some. Very interesting neighborhood we are going to try and get back down there Friday night when it should be busier.
That’s Bill’s post. The school should never have put a beginning language learner with a teacher who can’t explain anything to him. It’s completely overwhelming to have someone giving you instructions in a language you can’t understand. She tried to have him do a worksheet, but she couldn’t explain what he was supposed to do or what the concepts were. It’s hard enough to understand another language in a quiet, classroom setting, but in a noisy restaurant, it’s impossible. I’m hoping I can talk to the school tomorrow and get him a different teacher and a quite space. He did really well last week, and it would be nice if he had the opportunity to continue.
As he said above, after class, we decided to go to a trendy neighborhood called Getsemani. There’s a well-known salsa club there that I wanted to go to. Unfortunately, the salsa club is only open Thursday-Saturday from 8:30pm to 4am so we will have to go another night. The neighborhood is very mixed with extremely nice buildings next to super sketchy ones. People were living in apartments right next to restaurants in an area that, we think, gets wild beginning Thursday night. There was a strong police presence there tonight and it’s only Monday. It’s a fun neighborhood though with shops, bars, restaurants and street performers. We found a neat, very colorful restaurant. The music inside was loud, but we found a table on a private balcony on the second floor and that was perfect. We got to watch street performers on the square below us. There was a very talented group doing break-dancing and a Michel Jackson impersonator. We walked around for a while before and after supper.
The food was good. I had a pan fried fish fillet and Bill got fried shrimp, calamari and fish. The restaurant forgot his French fries, which was disappointing, but he had a cookie when we got back to the apartment, so he’ll probably be okay! We have colorful pictures posted below!
Traveling with Emily! 