schoolmates

I´m in spanish class with people from all over europe.  Without exception people here are very smart.  It's a tiny tower of babel where people draw on all of their linguistic resources to communicate with one another.

• I live with Maria, a quiet economics student from Austria.  We tend to communicate in Spanish because her english is bad and my german is non-existent.  This morning she told me about the organic farm her parents run in the austrian countryside.  ("We haff... uh... pollos... and... vacas...")

There are two rather culturally schizophrenic Italians.

• One is the son of italian parents who own a restaurant in england.  He's a born-again Christian who plans to spend the next 10 years in Andalucia.
• The other grew up in Italy the son of an Italian father and a Bermudan mother.  He's currently living in Strausbourg, France and working as an engineer for Johnson & Johnson.
• Julia is from Cardiff, Wales.  She´s one of several language teachers who have chosen to spend their summer as students.  She´s a thin vegetarian with long, long brown hair and wine colored lips -- half the time from vino tinto and half the time from lipstick.
• A pair of goofy dutch journalists.  They live in Brussels and work as EU correspondants.  The male half of the couple is the only Dutch person I´ve ever met with bad English.  This includes includes homeless people lying on the streets of Amsterdam.  He looks a little like a more northern version of Roberto Benigni.  He has that same sort of village idiot look -- hyperanimated hands and face.  It´s hard not to smile when you see him.
• An Austrian legal intern. He´s a little boring, but spent 15 minutes or so yesterday telling me how he´d like to study hebrew so he can study the caballah in the original.
• Ursula is an enormous German woman who works as a chaplain in a cancer ward.  She´s on a year-long sabbatical and spent the six weeks antecedant to her arrival walking the camino de Santiago.