Another enduring traumatic memory I have of teaching Spanish in peoples home is “thong-gate”. No, not me in a thong you will be glad to hear. Personally I have always thought thongs were uncomfortable and hideous and don’t look good on anyone unless the have a flawless body, especially men. (sorry)
One day I had the unfortunate experience of finding this to definitely be true..
Thong is Spanish is “tanga” and I was definitely tanga-ed that day.
Karen was a nice enough lady who I had been teaching Spanish to for several weeks over the winter in her home. I had also had the dubious pleasure of taking her husband Billy to the hospital a couple of times as his interpreter. Interpreting is another source of interesting experiences I will be looking at in this blog. I didn’t like him much, he was arrogant and nasty, and to all accounts he wasn´t averse to laying hands on Karen when he had had a drink.
Alcohol is a bit problem in the Ex Pat community in Spain, it is cheap, the sun is normally shining, and most of us tend to drink more here than in the UK, certainly years ago.
As winter changed to spring the temperatures increased and I went around there one beautiful morning and Karen suggested we take class on the patio as it was so nice. I agreed, and all was well until about fifteen minutes in when Billy suddenly appeared and walked past us to go and lie by the pool, and guess what he was wearing? And a very small one at that. It left absolutely nothing to the imagination.
At first I thought “poor guy, he will be mortified, he mustn’ t have realised I was here”.
After the 5th or 6th time he walked past in so many minutes it dawned on me that it was possible it might be because I was there. I looked beseechingly at Karen but she totally ignored him and just concentrated on her worksheet. Seated and trapped on the very small patio, I was at eye level with Billy´s budgie smugglers every time he walked past, and was regaled with a lovely back view as he went past to the pool.
I wouldn´t have liked it even if he was a Chippendale, and Billy wasn´t ….. He was at least 65 years old and he was thin, and I mean thin, almost emaciated, with the leathery brown skin you get if you sunbathe too much here. From the back looked he like two conkers rubbing together.
Thank God the class was only an hour long, because those last 45 minutes went very, very slowly. Billy pranced backwards and forward and stopped to chat often directly in front of me. It was horrible. To this day I cannot see a thong without a shudder going through me.
Most people I have taught Spanish to in their homes have been lovely and very welcoming, and have not worn thongs or been drunk 🙂
However, these bad experiences I did have, along with the fact I was getting busier and running out of time to drive from one student to another, meant I decided to find some premises to teach Spanish from so I did not have to go through this again. That is where Charlie.com came in and I will be talking about that soon.
But the next couple of “confessions” will be from some notable experiences I had as an interpreter many years ago.
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CONFESSIONS OF A SPANISH TEACHER 