I'm really very cultured, don't you know

The power cut out again last night(!) so I went to see a film called Deuxieme Souffle, as part of the ongoing free arts festival to celebrate the city's four-hundred-and-somethingeth anniversary. The film was in french with spanish subtitles- I'm not quite sure what I was trying to achieve... maybe some kind of franish learning experience. It was also two and a half hours long, which is something I didn't realise until I was there... I stuck it out though. Surprisingly, I understood more of the spanish than the french, most probably because french gangsters talk too fast and the spanish words were there for me to read. I think it was a successful learning experience, although being a pretty standard 1960's style action film complete with dependent, stilletto wearing blonde, the result would have been just as easy to grasp in Swahili.

Two and a half hours of triple translating seems to have helped me somehow, as I discovered today at the newspaper, when given the task of translating all of the day's local papers into english and re-writing the arts and entertainment sections. I managed it, and felt pretty proud (but no I did not read 200+ pages word for word...). I wish that mexican people came with subtitles. Maybe they could appear automatically across the person's forehead.

In terms of reading, I have finished The Power and the Glory by Graham Green, which I found in my room left by the ghost of tenants past, and would highly recommend. So then I came up with the crazy idea that I should buy a novel in spanish to translate, and at the market in Chapultapec on Saturday night I did just that. Not just any novel, in fact- but a Gabriel Garcia Marquez one... just to punish myself. I blame Cake Boy, who also insisted that I haggle to reduce the crazy price of 30pesos (one pound fifty)... I thought I gave a pretty convincing argument but the seller just laughed at me, eventually knocking 5 pesos off out of pity, I think. Laugh, he may have done, but I was definitly the winner that evening because those extra 5 pesos bought me a bookmark with Hitler's face on it to go with my book, which I bought because... well, I found it just a little bit funny.

So far, I have read two pages. There is a corpse (cadaver) and a boy who is wearing green chords, which are too tight for him. Prizes to anone who can guess which book I have... because I still can't work out the title of it. Or haven't got round to it. Shh...

Other new words I learnt today through translating articles include:

encuesta (survey)
desnudo (naked)
and camello (camel, and also drug-pusher!)

Such useful vocabulary.