spanish – Page 24 – don't confuse the narrator

moral education

I am intrigued by the institution in the photo:

I’m not sure if the C.E. is centro educativo or centro de educación, but, either way, it looks like they will try and give students a moral education.
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“it killed the ancient romans…”

Despite being as ready as any of my classmates to chant the rhyme –

Latin is a language as dead as dead can be;
It killed the ancient Romans, and now it’s killing me.

– Latin was actually my favourite school subject and I have long believed it was the most useful subject I studied.
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Yesterday I complained that the weather had taken a turn for the worse. In fact it turned out that really I was just up too early for my own good: once the sun got up, the wind blew most of the clouds away.

This reminded me of the times when we would be on holiday at the seaside when I was a child and the days almost always seemed to start off looking unpromising. I remember my parents assuring us it was “only a heat haze”, and it’s true it often seemed to burn off by middle morning.

It’s perfectly clear that yesterday’s cloud wasn’t a heat haze, but it got me thinking about weather, about how vocabulary is so often tied to location, and about how both weather and the words we use for it have personal connotations.
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fur tree

lichens on oak tree trunk — I'm lichen it

“The times they are a-changing.” Or, at least, the weather is. And in Spanish, of course, tiempo is the word for both time and weather. (More about that in the ‘having a good time’ post.)

Yesterday, I sat outside sun-bathing and watched the very first swallows of the season sitting on the phone wires apparently tidying themselves up after their long journey.

Today the wind is howling, and the sight of the the billowing tree tops through the window is enough to make any one feel sea-sick. Perhaps the oak tree in the photo will be pleased to be wrapped up warm in its furry green coat.

en un lugar de la mancha

I’m sure I’ve said before that one of the joys of living in Spain is being able to buy quite drinkable wine at ridiculously low prices. (I wonder what would happen if the taxes on alcoholic drinks here were like they are in the UK.)

The list of denominaciones de origen for Spanish wines is long and impressive, featuring such famous names as Rioja, Ribera del Duero, Rueda and Valdepeñas. The label in the photo is not from one of these, though. It’s a wine from la Mancha, and presumably the skinny little figure in red is Don Quijote himself.

There’s a huge difference between un vino de la Mancha and una mancha de vino, of course, but seeing the label made me wonder whether there are any vineyards around Staines.