nevis

THIS IS ED SPEAKING...

This is now Ed's introduction, because he has written it on "Wer bin ich?". I'm shifting it to his corner.

Zitat:
"Well, let's start by saying I was born in Portugal, one year after a military dictatorship was installed in the country. So, by the tender age of ten I had already to wear a green shirt and recognize the Portuguese equivalent of commands such as "Attention", "Forward, march!" or "Eyes right!"

My mother was born in Seville, so both Portuguese and Spanish were heard at home. In high school I had French and English, and in my senior year I took an elective course in Italian.

I had three years of German in college, bur our instructor was a gentleman with a Serbian surname, who preferred to spend a fair part of the class time telling us jokes in Portuguese. As a result my (feeble) command of the language began rapidly to decline after graduation. The lowest point came one morning in Munich. I had got off the train and started walking to a nearby small hotel. I managed to understand that yes, they had a room, but not vacant until after twelve noon. How about my suitcase? I tried to remember the German word for "leave". The closest thing that came out was "Darf ich mein Gepäck hier lieben?"

In Portugal I taught high school for ten years. Mainly English and Portuguese, but also subjects I knew very little about, which my elder colleagues preferred not to teach, like History and Geography.

Then I spent one year in England and another year in Mexico. In 1962 I settled in California where I still live. For twenty-nine years I taught Portuguese and Spanish at the University of California in Los Angeles.

I am now retired and spend a good portion of my free time writing books that not even my best friends read, and newspaper articles that a few people do read."
Ende des Zitats

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n e v i s
Ein Schiff ist am Hafen immer sicher, dafür wurde es aber nicht gebaut...