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| Spanish Lessons with Angel |
Oh....learning a language can be so hard! Especially the older you get. Matt and I invested in three levels of Rosetta Stone and that was helpful. It gave me a decent vocabulary but I still had trouble forming sentences and I didn't understand conjugation. We also purchased a much less expensive program, Visual Link Spanish, that I worked on quite a bit before we left Kansas City. It helped a lot with conjugation but didn't help much with forming sentences. I took a community college course in conversational Spanish the last few months we were in Kansas City. That helped some....but I was always the quiet one in the class because I couldn't think fast enough to do much conversing! Since being in the DR, I've tried to communicate but I found my pronunciation is way off. So for the last several weeks, I've been working with a tutor. Angel (my tutor) is from Spain and while here in the DR he teaches at the Spanish language school in Sosua in the mornings and teaches kite surfing in the afternoon. But he also tutors on the side so twice a week he spends 90 minutes with me trying to hammer into my head the finer points of communicating in Spanish. He's got his work cut out for him. But he seems very patient so that's good....and he's very cute, so that helps as well. Matt took this pic of one of my sessions.
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| Rymond with Fattie, Syd & Victoria |
This week two of our favorite couples went home. Raymond and Victoria left on Tuesday. Victoria is from St. Petersburg, Russia. Raymond is from Los Angeles. They spent two months here along with their very spoiled pup Fattie. Victoria is so sweet, never a mean word for anyone. She seems very quiet, but she told me it's because she's not confident with her English. She actually speaks English very well....amazing since it's since a different language than Russian. Raymond is a story and a half. He started out as a New York cop but was involved in a shooting and had to take a disability retirement. He then moved to LA where he seems to do a bit of everything. His love....after Victoria and Fattie.....is poker. He is officially the North Coast (of the DR) champ. Raymond's email address is "thatarrogantape".....perfect. I'll never forget it. Victoria hates LA and Raymond hates cold weather, so they usually meet for long vacations about three times a year. Victoria decided their next trip should be to Mexico this summer since we'll be there. We hope to hook up with them while we're in Lake Chapala.
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| Deb and Richard |
Today, Deb and Richard left. They'd been here six weeks. We spent a lot of beach time with them and had a lot of dinners in Cabarete. We educated them on how to ride a guagua and they learned very well. They went to Las Terrenas with us and we had a great time. I know they're happy to get home to their granddaughter but we will miss them. Hope to see them when we go to Canada next summer.
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| Nona....not sure what's she is doing! |
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| Matilde |
Two people who take very good care of us are the housekeepers, Matilde and Nona. These two beautiful ladies work very hard to keep all ten condos clean as well as the exterior halls and stairwells. They are always cleaning, mopping and washing linens, but always seem very happy. They both have beautiful voices and often sing while they are cleaning. One day this week they took a little break and came down to the beach. Unfortunately I had already gone inside, but Matt had a good visit with them (in Spanish of course) and got to watch them have fun on the beach. Then after a short break, they went back to work.
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