So I felt like a new challenge for 2007 and I thought I'd give learning Greek a shot.
I was speaking to Andrée at the wedding of some mutual friends last year and she mentioned that she'd had remarkable success using the Pimsleur language learning system. In fact, she told me that she reached a level of some fluency in Persian after just one month.
Now Andrée being one of the few people whose views I take seriously when it comes to learning languages (she speaks Japanese fluently as well as Farsi) I thought it probably worthwhile trying out this Pimsleur malarkey.
I set up an alert on eBay and have managed to hunt down CD sets for Arabic, Hebrew and Thai as well as Greek (when I say I'm trying out a language learning methodology, I don't mess about).
My goal was to study a language from a culture I find fascinating and that is not Germanic or Romance in origin - I speak French and Swedish fluently, used to speak Spanish very well (my first degree is in French and Spanish) and at one point my Italian was almost respectable. I also once managed to learn sufficient Danish to get round bars, restaurants and taxis without reverting to English.
All of the CD sets that I bought fit the bill: I have a friend in Thailand who I'd quite like to visit; I've always wanted to learn Arabic and Hebrew (due to an interest in the Middle East and bafflement at the political/military situation in that part of the world), but Greek won the day because my fine friend Sven has been busy over the past couple of years buying property on two Greek islands and he's invited me to go down there and stay.
Having an underlying motivation for learning a new language is crucial because it takes perseverance. While I find figuring out grammar systems quite stimulating (at least to the modest level that I want to take it), learning vocabulary is tough. I have quite a good technique for learning vocab, or set of techniques, which I may describe on this blog at some point, but even so it is hard work and requires dedication.
I will write up a fairly detailed review of Pimsleur's Greek course when I get further into it. For the moment I'll just say that I've just finished lesson eight out of thirty and I'm quite comfortable asking someone if they want to eat or drink something and telling them that I want to go to a restaurant on Victory Street!
I do hope I take to Pimsleur, mainly because I want to learn Arabic and Hebrew too!!
I've been a bit slack in writing up the final daily account of my week at a Crisis centre for 2006. That's mainly because I've been somewhat under the weather (still am) but I figure I'd better post it now or I'll never get round to it.
The last day of the Open is dreaded by many volunteers, especially if the weather is poor. Think about it for a second: after seven days of welcoming homeless people in to have a shower, a medical check-up and whatever else they are in need of, suddenly it's all change and we're pushing Guests out onto the street again.
It's the one day that I always sign up for, as I couldn't ask anyone else to do it in my place. One year I was traumatised for several weeks if not months after one guest, a young girl, put up a huge resistance to leaving. Last year, I stood in the rain for over an hour trying to explain to an old lady from somewhere in Eastern Europe that there was no point in staying, because the centre was literally being taken apart.
This year the centre was smaller as there is no central 'main' centre. The weather was also relatively benign as it only started raining in the afternoon. As a result, the operation to empty the centre of Guests went remarkably smoothly, with relatively little bad temper on the front gate, which is where I spent the morning once again.
From 7am we operated a one-way system: out only. Guests were woken up early for breakfast - Key Volunteers, including me, were asked to come in at 6am instead of 7am so that we'd be ready to swing into action as early as possible.
Interestingly the night shift had had 106 volunteers turn up, which I guess goes to show that people are willing to help at night, provided it's not a weekday (it was Friday night). We had around 70 in the morning.
On leaving the front gate, guests were given a bag containing various items of clothing and toiletries and a series of buses swept those that needed it to several mainline stations (Kings Cross, Victoria and Temple) so for a couple of hours there was a continual ebb and flow of people leaving the centre and waiting for transport.
A dozen or so people had left items inside the centre and a group of volunteers acted as 'runners' - taking details of belongings and shuttling between the gate and the luggage store. At about 9.30am, I accompanied one chap who had forgotten his medication on one of the sleeping floors. Where just a couple of hours before more than 100 people had been sleeping, it was an empty room - the vacuum cleaners were in action cleaning up the last pieces of litter. Luckily one of the volunteers, Laurence, had found the medicine and put it to one side, so the Guest took it and we went back outside.
Another Guest was livid that we wouldn't allow him to go back inside to fetch his "video charger with a battery on top" that he'd left plugged into "a socket under a table somewhere on the first floor" of the centre. Amazingly after having been in to look twice, a volunteer found the charger and brought it back to the Guest who promptly left.
During that time I had a rather amusing experience: said Guest was bawling in my left ear that all the volunteers were interested in was following procedures and that we were useless and heartless, etc. an elderly gentleman came up to me, grabbed my arm and said in a soft voice that he had had a wonderful week and would like to thank me and all the other volunteers for making him so happy. I did think about leaning backwards and asking him to repeat that to Mr Angry, but thought better of it.
By 10.45am all the guests had left the centre and we began clearing up the centre.
Beds, computers, partitions and more beds were transported by teams of volunteers down to the ground floor where they were either stored in what had been the kennels or loaded onto lorries, which whisked them straight off to Crisis's warehouse on the Old Kent Road.
We all stopped for lunch at around 1pm and that was when I realised just how tired I was. I lay down after a meal of vegetarian pie and veggies. Getting up has never been harder. I'd also by this time developed a slight sore throat.
We carried on until just after 4pm at which point we were debriefed and released to the pub!
We stayed in The Princess Alice (where we managed to drink them out of Guinness!) on Commercial Street for two (or in my case three) pints and then headed off south of the river to the Dog House on Kennington Road, where volunteers from the Drinkers Centre had taken up residence from 11am.
As the evening drew on, volunteers, in particular Green Badges, grew more and more tired. I saw at least two GBs from my centre (roll call: Ellie, Graeme) almost asleep in their pints. Happily for me the Dog House is no more than a five minute stumble to my flat. I staggered home at closing time and slept.