Saturday night’s all right for…….
….working! Yes, that’s right. I’m working. Other half and little one have gone off down to Genova. This means that I can get on with preparing for a meeting on Monday. The meeting will be about a new course I’m cooking up with another guy. This other guy is an expert on certain things financial - so he can deal with the vocational stuff, while yours truly will concentrate on the best way of getting people to talk about certain aspects of financial data in English. I’m not going to be any more specific than that.
Anyway, while listening to a bit of Yes and downing a drop or two of red wine, I’m trying to persuade those old creative juices to flow - which, I’m happy to say they are doing. At least I’ve got some experience at planning workshop type courses now. Another course which I planned and ran is to be held for the third time down in Rome. The first time I ran this course it went better than I had hoped for and the second time was even better. The course participants were most complimentary, or so I heard from my colleague.
I begin my course planning process by thinking about the objective, then I’ll spend some time hopping around the world wide web hunting for information and potential material. Once I’ve got this, I’ll start drafting a structure which will provide a route towards the final objective. The activities I’ll come up with could be thought of as being feeding stops on the way towards the destination. Once I’ve fed all the information I think is necessary to those doing the course, then I can start them on the final exercise which attempts to tie everything together and thus hits the objective. That is the theory anyway.
My oh my, this process sounds quite straightforward when put down on ‘digital’ paper, but it can be quite testing. Once I’m happy with the road and the stops, I can start to build a presentation. These presentations buck the trend of presentations generally, seeing as I’ll include rather more on my slides than I would if I were presenting to mother tongue speakers. I find this aids comprehension, which keeps everything going where I need it to go.
Right, back onto the road. I’m not quite there yet in terms of direction and stops, but I want to have a reasonable idea before Monday’s meeting.
Just in case you think I’m a work-o-holic, I should add that I spent some of the afternoon wandering around with my camera taking a few pics. I have not reviewed them yet, some I’m not sure whether I’ve got anything that I really like.
OK, I’m signing off for now. Back to the grindstone. Enjoy your Saturday evening!
Sweating is dangerous for you
Well, so it would seem here in Italy. I have been having arguments with my Italian other half about the sweatiness of our little one. He, like me, is prone to sweating. And being an energetic 4 year old, he runs around and sweats even more. This is dangerous in Italy, apparently, as it can provoke colds and catarrh. What I don’t really understand is, if sweating is so dangerous, why she insists on dressing our little one in long and heavy trousers. Surely this will cause him to sweat even more and the heavy clothes will retain the sweat and, apparently, lead to health problems. Don’t even start me on about creating through drafts in the house to cool us all down - this is much more dangerous and potentially fatal in Italy as far as I can make out.
These are cultural things and it is not only my other half who worries about the ill effects of sweating and cooling breezes. English people do not seem to get all hot and bothered about getting all hot and sweaty and opening windows to let a breath of fresh air in. On the sweat front, I have been hot and sweaty on plenty of occasions, but don’t seem to have suffered any ill-effects, not as far as I am aware. On the other hand, I think my other half would just about tie our little one down in order to prevent him from doing anything which might provoke sweating. Indeed, I am told not to play with my son during the summer months at times, because I may cause him to sweat. Is this normal? I don’t think so, but then I could be very wrong.
I’m inclined to believe that couples from different cultures all have similar problems with silly little cultural differences, and that these differences do not make mixed cultural relationships particularly easy. Molehills can, indeed, become mountains in terms of mixed cultural relationships.
Mozzie bites getting you down? Try this….
…..menthol talc. You can get it in the pharmacies here - ‘Talco Mentolato’ and it seems to take the itch out of those pesky and all too frequent mozzie bites. It seems to have worked for me, well, the bites have stopped itching. We had some of the stuff lying around after the chicken pox outbreak which hit my son and myself. This talc did not do much for the ‘pox itchiness, but, so far, the mozzy induced itchiness seems to have gone.
Try it, you might like it - unless you are allergic to talcum powder, as my other half claims to be.
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Photos from Flickr
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