23 february 2005

Today I was a complete failure. After the first twenty minutes or so of being a failure, though, the defense mechanisms kick in. You can actually get used to being a failure with alarming ease.

I spent six hours in meetings that were held largely in Dutch. The other participants made a valient effort to begin conversation in English, but, understandably, it didn't last. Actually, I understood a surprising smattering of words. But this didn’t matter much. To me, it was something like this:

“I think the best way to start the project about the… mmm… (switch to Dutch) city dutch dutch big dutch dutch dutch dutch dutch. And I think that dutch dutch environment dutch if we dutch dutch dutch alone. But it is important to dutch dutch dutch dutch dutch. Dutch dutch dutch. Dutch dutch 1982. Dutch until dutch dutch canals dutch. True! True!”

And so on.

On the plus side, I am excelling at Spanish. Not just your garden variety Spanish – although I am getting good at the Spain lisp – but specifically your inexcusably filthy Venezuelan Spanish. I can now belt out, among other choice phrases: it’s fucking cold!, what the fuck?, let’s get the fuck out of here!, and give me that fucking thing!. This may sound simple, but Venezuelan Spanish is more colorful than English, so this “fuck” is not accomplished with a single Spanish explative. For example, “Give me that fucking thing,” translates, not so roughly, to, “Give me that little vagina!”

Yeah, I'm a fucking posterchild for the benefits of foreign exchange.