school

I am taking classes in the center of the city, at one of the millions of language schools all around. The teachers are all enthusiastic, waving their arms all around and opening their mouths so wide even to say the simplest of words. I have three teachers.
Marta is the morning teacher. Thin, pale, with dark flying-around hair an expressive sharp-featured face and an explosive personality. She always wears these flowy dresses and sometimes looks very sad. I very much like her and I fancy that she likes me the best of all the students. She once said that her father is passionate about indigenous cultures and it really endeared me to her. I like to think of her having dinner at her father´s apartment surrounded by artifacts and heavy books about the Mayans.
Marciel is the afternoon teacher. Probably in his fifties, Marciel is not bad looking. He needs reading glasses only sometimes and has kind eyes that seem to deeply consider the questions of his students. His only real remarkable trait is that when he gets talking fast, a single line of white froth spittle appears in the perfect center of his lower lip. For this, I like him. They are both good teachers, refuse to speak any English and rattle on as if we understand them always. They especially like to talk about politics or media. Class is usually started by reading newspaper headlines.
Claudia is my private teacher. Small, boyish and very dark, almost black kind eyes. She has a tiny, somewhat strained voice, as if her throat is constricted. She is nothing like the other two teachers. She is quiet and private and shares little about herself, accept that she lives with her boyfriend who does not cook at all and thus she must cook everyday, though she hates it. She chooses funny times to break into English, as if she wants me to really understand a particular point. This was one of those times, and breaking out of her rapid Spanish she said carefully, "we no eat delicious food at our house." It made her laugh and so I laughed too. She has a strange ability to make me very nervous--I never know where to put my hands, my eyes, my feet. This is good, I think; if I can learn under these nervous conditions, then I am prepared for anything.


Then there are the students. There are many of them, always milling about the water dispenser in various combinations. I have three others in my class. First there is Peter: sixty years of age, Swiss German, obsessive in all he does-notes, punctuality, pronunciation, etc. He fits all of the stereotypes of his nation´s people. He has a little sack of neatly sharpened colored pencils, so as to color-code his notes and highlight roots and endings of verbs. He also has a neatly trimmed moustache (which I noticed he has trimmed more than once in the last couple of weeks), a balding head and ruddy complexion. His pronunciation is mechanical and utterly infuriating.
Andy: 20 years old, German and very proud to be so (a fact which he as declared to our class, which made everyone look at the ground). He is thick, pasty, doughy. Dresses like frat boy and brags about his capacity for beer. He is smug, full of rolling eyes and heavy sighs. He fiddles quite a lot with his MP3 player and likes to make superlative statements such as, ¨"Oktoberfest es el mas grande fiesta el todo mundo." The teacher had to argue that Carnivale was, but Andy sat proud, eyes unblinking beneath the brim of his trucker cap.
Laia: Norwegian, blonde, fair, and avoids eyecontact (except with andy). Her age is unknown, though I guess 35 or so. It is difficult to tell especially since she and Andy are very buddy buddy--always taking their breaks together and looking at eachother across the table. She is sweet, timid, but seems utterly interested in my eagerness to speak of our common ancestors. She speaks Spanish with a lovely accent--rapidly and with funny lilts and trills. It makes me wish I were Norwegian learning Spanish. Nevertheless, she is really struggling with direct and indirect object pronouns. I quite like her.

I understand that my descriptions seem cruel and joyless. I assure you they are not. I spend many hours with them each day. The six hours of class makes my head spin, and it doesn´t stop spinning as I try to sleep. My dreams these nights are full of people from home and my classmates along with this ever present stressful feeling of searching for a word.
But despite what it seems, with all my criticism and nervous sleep, I am indeed having a `good´time. `good´in the sense that it is what I wanted- the learning, the exploring, the meeting of new things, words, food and people every moment. I will later write about some of the fun times, but for now certain characters need to be developed as they will not be part of my life for much longer. I will say though that Elsa and I are becoming closer all the time. She irons while I eat my breakfast in the morning and some nights she drinks Fernet Branca with me before bedtime. She takes it the same as I do, just with soda water, not with coca-cola as is the custom of her country people. Her daughter is having trouble with her pregnancy and so Elsa is very worried. When I returned home this evening she was researching diseases on Wikipedia. Motherhood, it seems, and its relationship with the internet is a cross cultural phenomenon.