Pirates and eggplant

[abka]

We had a fairly nice weekend. Friday night Denis worked (surprise, surprise), but Emma and I went and saw Pirates of the Carribean (on Andrew's recommendation). It was a fabulous pirate movie, I really enjoyed it. We even sat through the credits for the final monkey scene. Saturday we both worked and then I went to a WCMA opening for Nicole Cohen's "Ma Vie en Rose". The opening was nice, but I didn't stay too long. The show looks great! Sunday we were going to work, but decided we needed a day off so just hung out at home. We made eggplant parmagana together which was more of a production than I originally planned. I started out cooking myself, but had to recruit Denis and he ended up doing most of the actual cooking while I washed a mountain of dishes. It took a while, but the result was yummy. Then he even spent time with me while I worked on my Croatian (I'm a little behind). It helps tremendously to hear someone pronounce the words correctly. It was so nice to study together (ok I was studying, he was teaching/reading/repeating). Unfortuantely another weeked spent procrastinating about Fulbright/grad. school stuff (although Croatian should count). I'm going to at least start contacting more people this week.

Comments

[abka.livejournal.com]

Yes I also have reading knowledge of German and French (the two languages most art historians are required to learn) and can speak a (very little) of each. Italian is really what I'm most proficient in although it's been a while and with languages you tend to loose them pretty quickly without practice. Languages are one of the few art-historian skills that seem somewhat concrete to non-art history people, but they take forever to learn and often you just gain reading proficiency instead of speaking so it can be kind of frustrating to understand, but not be able to produce anything. You only really tend to gain proficiency in whatever you do your dissertation research in. I'll probably be working on one language or another for many years to come, luckily the learning process can be fun and it's a nice break from writing.