Dubai, because it's better than French Class...

I missed some class because of an unplanned trip to Dubai. Not much happened, other than half the class has the flu.

The loud Portuguese woman is becoming more annoying everyday. It started by being generally 100% louder than anyone else in the class and trying to answer every single question. Then last week we did an exercise in a room where everyone wears headphones with a microphone on them and we repeat some dialogue so the teacher can hear us individually at a control panel at the front of the class. This would have gone well if Loud Portuguese Woman (LPW) didn't holler all of her answers into the microphone that is less than an inch from her mouth. I couldn't even hear myself conjugate "Avoir" over her butchering her "Etre"s.

Today it came to a head when I was having trouble pronouncing a word (it happens often) and she started laughing hysterically at my mispronunciation. Now, I am not particularly good at French, but it was not at all funny, let alone enough to be doubled over and screaming like she was. Swiss French teacher called her out on it saying Anglophones have trouble with this particular word and that she (LPW) has trouble pronouncing different words and no one laughs at her. LPW did not learn from this, laughing and pointing at a nice Argentinian woman for making a small mistake an hour later. I am not the only one beginning to seriously dislike her.

Highlight of the class today: Learning the different quarks of communication from different cultures. Examples:

- A human making a dog barking noise around the world: Woof woof, arf-arf, bow-wow, taff-taff, eff-eff, kaack-kaack, cue-cue.

- Some cultures wave "come here" upside-down (it's stranger than you think, try it!).

- Different parts of the world start to count to five on their hands using different fingers. Some start with the little finger, some start with the thumb. Anyone who has seen "Inglorious Basterds" knows this.

- The French make a sound effect when doing things that has no English translation. For instance, while typing in your information, a customer service person might say "tack!" while entering a line of data. It means nothing, other than "tack!"