The Danger of Strawberries

It would make my life an awful lot easier if everyone in Mexico were to speak Spanish. Or English, of course, but recently whenenever I try to create a phrase out of nothing, my brain primarily tries to make me say it in french. I struggled with french in school, but now I don't need it as much, it won't leave me alone...  Last year I also did a crash course in Italian, which deserted me as soon as I landed in Venice, but now that I don't need any of it, has come back with a vengence to confuse me even more. The result of all of this is that on days like today when I am super tired, I start to speak in a kind of language which I like to call 'Fritanish'. Forsinstance: "Je voudrais un poquito mas de pollo en mi... sandwich please." That's a made up example. Usually my desperately poor smatterings of languages are more sneaky and mix up the linking words or ponunciation: Lots of words are very similarly spelt in spanish and italian, but have very different pronnciations... Tomorrow I might try communicating everything I want to say through a series of interpretative dance.

That said, it is quite easy for me to speak in English at the newspaper office. Which probably doesn't help matters at all. There are two editors, one American and one English, but their accents seem to have merged to form a non-descript 'ex-pat' accent. The more English editor is currently in the UK, so I only really hear his voice over Skype. There is also a Bulgarian woman, who conforms to the stereotype. No more neeeds to be said. Her ability to flip between several languages however, is most enviable. Then there are several Mexican emloyees, most of which understand English apart from one lovely but slightly crazy and quite terrifying lady who goes on and on at me in Spanish at a very rapid pace, while I stare blankly and nod. I have a feeling she is confessing her life's secrets  me, comforted by the fact that I cannot respond.

Yet.

So the newspaper work is going well. I wrote an article on the Mexico City gas explosion, but then spent most of today and yesterday re-sizing photos for their new website. Pretty tedious, but I don't really mind; such is the life of an intern. The only thing which really does irritate me about working in American-English is the date system. I spent the day selecting photographs from date-organised folders... it probably took longer than it should have because I just cannot get my head around the american datings. "October 2", rather than "the 2nd of October". Which makes it 10-2-12 rather than 02-10-12. Silliness!!

In other news, there is a new member of the household. A Mexican girl called Montse (as in Montserrat...) is renting Rosie's spare room. It was a few days before I caught sighting of her, but  since then we have had a couple of roof-top chats, and she is really ni ce. She goes to the university just down the road and smokes a lot. She once rented a room across the road, so she knows the area really well. We bonded over our shared annoyance by the bar across the road playing really bad music. She told me a charming story of how some drug-dealer got shot just outside a few years ago. I asked her if all the shoes hanging on telephone wires outside meant that drug-dealers still lived there. "No," she replied, "that's just when people get bored and throw their shoes over the wires".

Today Montse told me all about how strawberries are dangerous because they carry so many little bugs and apparently Meningitis, too. I'm not quite sure how that works, but I politely declined anyway. I'll stick to peelable fruits.