3 September 26
Catalunya in German
We took the month off in our German class (this is a weekly Zoom meeting through International House which I’ve been running since our teacher Paul died a couple of years ago). I was asked to make a presentation on our Catalunya trip (this isn’t unusual; folks often share their photos from trips). I hurried to put one together.
I often tell people I don’t take photos on vacation, I sketch. But this is patently false, since I managed to find a whole load of pictures I took with my phone (sometimes to provide color reference for sketches I’ve made in ink but not yet painted in watercolor). It was fun to combine photos with sketches. The kids in this photo were football pals who had made 20 litres of lemonade (well, Ruth did) and crepes, which they sold for one Euro each in the plaza outside the village church and made a killing.
The difficulty comes in switching registers from Catalan to German. (I’ve made at least one German error in the caption to this photo: according to the acronym TEKAMOLO (temporal/causal/modal/local) which is used to remind students how to order German syntax, the “bei der Kirche” should come after “wärend der Eklipse.”) It was even harder on the day of the eclipse, when I was out and about sketching, running into a young French artist who had made it to Tivissa by train and hitchhiking. My French is, or was, good, but I found myself inserting Catalan words liberally into my French sentences…
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