two years two months two days

'My lines, all  my lines, are of the tenth intensity. They are not the words that express what I want to express; they are the only words I can find that come near to expressing a half.' The Dylan Thomas Centre is all I know in Swansea other than the (OK, not so) many blocks I walked from the train station (while eating awful Linda McCartney's vegetarian sausages) because a taxi driver refused, politely, that's true, to take me there, claiming it wasn't worth the ride, it was just down there, round the corner. He was, I was soon to find out, mistaken. Oh, well, it was a nice walk, even though I wouldn't say that particular part of the city was particularly pleasant. It wasn't unpleasant, either; it even reminded me of other cities, generic cities, even South American ones. Apart from the castle , of course. That's something I'd love to do if I ever go back there, to have a proper look at the castle. Hunt down the city's world-reno...

El cuarto de Tula has long been a favourite with Eliades Ochoa ’s group Cuarteto Patria . This extended descarga (Cuban jam style) features the great soneros Ibrahim Ferrer and Manuel ‘Puntillita’ Licea joining Eliades in improvising lyrics laced with sexual innuendo in the Santiago tradition. The extraordinary solo on the laoud (a small, twelve string instrument similar to a lute) is by Barbarito Torres , the finest player in Havana. The timbales are played by the 13 year old phenomenon, Julienne Oviedo Sánchez, already a veteran of some of Cuba’s most celebrated modern big bands.** Watching them (well, not exactly them , as this was… over a decade later and some of them had already passed away) live twice (‘passed away live twice’, great writing, Bruna, great writing) is high on my (still very modest) list of been-there-done-that things. Neither time was in Wales, I dragged my sister along to the Rio de Janeiro concert of their farewell tour a few years ago. She thought i...

It's a holiday in Brazil today, a bank holiday, a public holiday or whatever you'd call it. Inspired by a 1998 home-made VHS video of a French television concert I stumbled upon on YouTube the other day and have been watching ever since, I'm enjoying the joy of listening to Belle and Sebastian on the 1989-1991 Sony sound system my dad brought from Japan 26 years ago and I've gladly inherited while he's still alive, gladly. The sound is amazing. I can't help but turn it really up, to the dismay of my neighbours in the adjacent flats - and start dancing in the middle of the living room, to the amusement of my teenage girl student who lives in the building opposite mine and has taken to spying on me from her rich-people top floor flat. Working late into the night. Sending a friend good night. Waking up before the alarm clock goes off. Having a shower, washing your hair. Putting on a cute comfortable fraying old little dress. Having lots of cinammon a...

Because I should be either working or relaxing, this is just a short text to test a writing technique described in a resource book for EFL teachers, loopwriting. The idea is I can’t stop writing or even correct whatever’s already written, which is especially diffult to me, see? Diffult. I’m a horrible typist. And I’ve already paused for too long. And just cheated here, I did correct a couple of typos in my provious, previous, sentence. Anyway. I wonder who’ll resist the urge to stop reading this load of - whatever. I have no idea what to write about so I’m trying loopwriting. Which, BTW, consists of writing nonstop for a few minutes or whatever other limit set by the teacher or someone else in authority, oneself or who knows who else, then pause and summarise the main point of the chunk produced in a single sentence. Hopefully, this won’t become too long or too boring. I’d thought of writing about my first day in Cardiff this year, which will be the first of July, when I’ll be f...

I’m so angry I’m wasting yet another of already so many of my days off trying to come up with a definite plan for my next holiday in Wales (first, I was going to slowly travel northward before heading for Manchester and boarding a plane to London; then, I decided to fly to Anglesey and travel slowly back to the south instead; now, seeing just how long it’d take me to reach my first destination from the airport and just how expensive it’d be to spend a couple of nights, the first one literally just a night, there, I’m struggling to devise a plan… C) that I thought it’d be a good idea to give myself a break and focus on the marvellous music I’ve been listening to for the past couple of hours (no link? Suspense! lol). Last year, I spent most of my first weekend in Wales at Tafwyl, Cardiff’s annual Welsh arts and culture festival (yes, that came from its website ). It’s free, it’s family-friendly, there’s food, there’s music, you’re welcome if you’re a Welsh speaker and you’re ...

I’ve been trying to tidy up my bedroom for hours now, but these videos of dogs  (yes, this one understands Brazilian Portuguese - and is being scolded for fighting over his food), a Korean baby girl and the Obamas acting cute aren’t helping. Neither are the things I keep finding in boxes and bags from when I moved into the flat months ago, not only because I have no idea where to properly store them, but especially because they’re all so... entertaining, even the ones like a half-empty mini bottle of mouthwash (and, yes, here we find out my answer to one of the greatest questions of humankind: it is half-empty, my glass, or rather my bottle of mouthwash). One which reminded me of my not yet numerous holiday trips and impelled me to, well, come here and do some more babbling about Wales again. Yay. Let me see if I can find inspiration in the bag of leaflets I brought home last year. Memrise (thanks, Genia!) taught me the verb digwydd ,  which means 'to happen', an...

We had a meeting this afternoon. It’s the beginning of the school year here in my country, and we teachers are soon going to step into the classroom again. For me, it’s going to be the first time - well, first with groups, not private students, or at least first with groups of my own, not substitutions - since I came back from Wales and my two-month summer Welsh course . I’m teaching quite a lot of children, preteens and teens this term, apparently - I wonder if I could use Welsh words and phrases to bargain with them?... Teach them vocab related to whatever we’re learning - provided they behave? I’d learn a lot myself. And I’d be spreading the love-for-Wales around - OK, I’d be teaching them there is a country named Wales which stays in the UK (which is in Europe, Europe is a continent, not a country, nothing to do with the US, and England isn’t the UK, it is in the UK, well) and has its own very special, very old, very beautiful language very few people can actually speak, and I ...

It’s not that I’ve given up (on?) this blog - or Wales, or Welsh, for that matter -, it’s just that I’m suffering from severe writer’s block. Alors, je regarde Amélie encore une fois. Some years ago, I got this diary, with the girl on the cover, and I had this idea, I was going to copy the film script on it day by day, one sentence a day, and this, together with the fact that I’ve probably watched the film at least a dozen times, made me learn several of its lines by heart, sort of. Just like this blog, and most of what I do, it didn’t last, the copying-the-script-onto-my-diary plan. I might go back to it next year, though, just like I’m now giving this blog yet another chance. And this is all there is to a possible connection between these two topics. So let’s move on - let’s go back to Cardiff. How do you say Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain yn Gymraeg? I’ve deleted the other two texts I’d started, one began with a mention to the rain and I can’t ...