The Argentine peso closed today at 3.27 to the dollar. It was hovering around 3.03 for most of my stay until this week. I just don't get it. The US is in crisis, and the rest of the world pays. I guess I should have taken some economics classes instead of all of those art history classes in college!
Today I got back to my routine, more or less. I went to the gym in the morning, came home for lunch and then spent the afternoon on the computer, first watching the Daily Show and reading the news and then working on my new book. We got the good news recently the book I co-authored with two wonderful people I know in Arizona was accepted for publication by Michigan Press. We had hoped that Alta, the company that publishes all of our other books (my one and their many) would publish this one too, but Alta seems to be having some problems due to the budget crises in schools around the country. We shopped the book around and after some bumpy reviews and our responses, we finally got a yes from Michigan. I'm excited because I really like this book and think it will be a nice addition and a nice change to what is already out there.
My task was to edit the manuscript and get it to be under 200 pages double-spaced. I procrastinated and then had my bouts of illness which made it impossible to work. Finally today I could think of no more excuses and got to work. It ended up being a fun task and I am not completely finished but it looks like the manuscript is going to be well under 200 pages, which will give us a lot of flexibility in terms of what we want to add. We, of course, want the book to be affordable, so maybe less will be better.
Finally at 5, I started my walk to school. I discovered that my cell phone mysteriously lost all of the credits I had. My cell phone is the kind where you buy a card and rub off the silver to get a number which you then enter and get a certain number of credits. I had bought a card for 50 pesos and already had some credits on the phone but when I went to Uruguay I didn't charge the phone and when I came back I had to revive it (it was dead). Somehow in that process, I lost all of the credits.
I need a moviestar phone card to add more credit to the phone, but for some reason, Moviestar is difficult to find. I went to one kiosk and they sent me to a locutorio across the street (locutorio is like an internet cafe). I asked if they had moviestar cards and got a complicated answer that I didn't understand. I interpreted it as a "no" and went to the next kiosk. I was told "no me quedo", which I interpreted as a no. And so I went, from one to another until finally I asked at a kiosk, they sent me to the locutorio in the same space but further back, and voila! I got a card for 20 pesos.
There was a lot of traffic filling the streets as I made my way to school. It was not moving. People were obviously irritated as there was a lot of honking. But the sidewalks were unusually uncrowded. It's a long weekend, so it seemed like some people had already packed up and left town and others were trying to get out.
I got to school at 5:30 and got a bottle of water and sat in the bar and reviwed my Arabic so I wouldn't be totally lost in class. It didn't help. The class was more of the same. Ybtsi, had a book that she passed around and students took turns reading from it. She bounced around from the days of the week, time, at the airport, random vocabulary, pronouns, you name it, she covered it. It was a mess. The interesting thing is that the book she passes around actually has a method if she would just follow it. There were a bunch of words that started with the letter "d", like doodi, doodad, doodadi (I'm just making those up). The point was to help us to begin to read words with this letter plus different vowel combinations. But for some reason Ybtsi didn't see that.
Fortunately, Romena, a very nice young woman who entered our Saturday class two weeks late, came to tonight's class. She saved me from being the only one who was lost.
I really don't know what to do about this Friday night class. I guess it does help me a little, but I feel like I am getting in the way of everyone else's learning. If I weren't there, the other advanced students would be able to do more. The class is not geared to my needs. But I also don't want to give up. I want to try to make this work in spite of the ineffective teaching. I feel I can learn something from the experience, even if I don't learn Arabic. We'll see.
It was a nice walk home. Traffic had died down and the sidewalks were not terribly crowded. I'm guessing tomorrow's class is going to be a little smaller because it is a long weekend and apparently people leave town.
I'm still taking meclizine which is keeping me from getting dizzy, but the pressure in my ear was really strong tonight. I felt like my head was going to burst. I'm going to call an acupuncturist and see if that might help me. I kind of got tired of having those seeds in my ear and want to see if perhaps something that isn't so visible might work.
I'm going to get an early night's sleep so I'll be rested and alert for tomorrow's Arabic class.
No comments:
Post a Comment