Food continues to be a problem. Klara won’t eat anything on offer, and nobody opens for dinner before 8 pm, which is terribly late for our provincial souls. We were rescued today by an Indian restaurant which opened as early as 7 pm and offered such good food that Klara agreed to eat some plain rice and 1,5 cubes of chicken. This is her 6-month ration of chicken, so I’m happy.
Whoever starts opening for dinner at 4 pm for the tourist crowd and offers American-style kid menu in this city will make buckets of money.
On a positive side, N bought his first Spanish book that he plans to read in the original. It’s by the only Spanish-language author known in the post-Soviet space in the 1990s.
In the photo, you can see a very fancy hotel (on the right) where I stayed once but never again. The personnel was so obsequious that they talked to guests as if we were on the verge of expiring of some horrific disease. I’m not used to be treated like a precious porcelain of the Ming dynasty, and it all felt deeply uncomfortable.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’d rather deal with cranky staff any day!
Is it the sort of place where you can just go to a grocery shop and pick up some easy food like yogurt, bread, sandwich fixings, just to get the kiddo through the day?
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We have a kitchen, so I made pasta soup (her favorite) and that sort of thing. But I don’t want to be cooking every day on my vacation. I was hoping for at least a couple of dinners outside the home.
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“I was hoping for at least a couple of dinners outside the home”
Your employer clearly had other plans.
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What book is it? In my language, I’ve been sticking to kids books at this stage for the most part, honestly. I’m trying to make the best of it by focusing on traditional tales, “classic” children’s books that are widely beloved in France, and books with pleasant looking art. If I cannot yet competently read Les Miserables, I may as well become familiar with the beloved Babar, rather than some newfangled monstrosity with hideous pictures.
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Del amor y otros demonios by García Márquez.
It’s a brilliant idea to start with children’s books. I should try this with my students.
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When my daughter was studying Russian she watched all the Disney movies she knew as a child- but they were over-dubbed in Russian….
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I met kids in VN who spoke extraordinarily functional English (the English teachers out in the countryside cannot really speak English themselves), who had learned it almost entirely from watching bootleg American movies. It’s definitely a viable route to language-learning! One of my friends used to brush up on her Khmer using overdubbed Chinese soap operas.
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I did this with German and my kids do it with French. It really speeds up listening comprehension even if it doesn’t do a lot for verbal fluency. We read Latin translations of fables and nursery rhymes to get a break from exercises.
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The fact that they are shorter is also nice. Struggling through an entire novel when you can’t read well is intimating.
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