Shaken (and stirred)

Here I am, reporting back after my first week back to teaching! Quite an enjoyable week, if a bit stressful, as incredibly I had completely forgotten what it was like to work!! And I was only away for 3 and a half weeks... One of my students has been away, travelling through Africa for 10 months, and I cannot start to imagine how difficult it must be for her to re-adjust to the british way of life...

Anyway, it's great to meet old and new friends, and to discover how I can help them (hopefully) improve their language skills. The False Beginners courses seem like quite a challenging set of classes to teach, given the various skills the students possess, and what they need really still remains to be determined at this stage. It's going to be a tailor-made affair, which i quite like, since I will have to decide on a week by week basis what we do next so they reach the levels we agreed on! I suspect this will keep me out of mischief for some time to come!

I have also had good news, as I was contacted by Valerie Blanc, a French woman who has just started a new wine venture (La Provenance). She has offered to organise wine tasting sessions in French for those classes whose understanding of the language was sufficient to cope!
Keep your eyes peeled - I suspect the second week of October will be an alcoholic one!
;-)

Otherwise, I have been contacted by Jubilee Scotland, who are looking for volunteer interpreters to help in November:

Jubilee Scotland, the debt campaign organisation in Scotland is looking for French interpreters willing to volunteer their skills in November. We have a Malian activist coming to Scotland between 1-18 November and we need French speakers who could help translate/interpret for him at events. If you would like more information please get in touch at mail@jubileescotland.org.uk

More information on their website here. It seems a very worthy cause, and hopefully I will be able to help, though, as I pointed out, I am not a simultaneous interpreter, and I could probably only deal with very general translation and/or social events.

Anyway... I had a good laugh this week when asked by Darryl how to translate the famous James-Bondish 'Shaken, not stirred'. To my utmost shame, I was at a complete loss, and so resorted to google to find the appropriate answer and I found this:

"une Vodka Martini, médium dry, au shaker, non à la cuillère"

Truthfully, it seems to me a tad literal, but - hey! - who am I to judge?: all I could say when asked was 'erm... erm... Dunno... will look it up, I promise...' Anyone coming up with a better answer though will win... my eternal gratitude!