Not Bread Alone

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Today's new experience: A glass of apricot juice. Actually two because it's quite nice.

Seeing as I've been living on cheap tea, cheap eggs, and cheap bacon on cheap bread, I thought I could do with some fresh fruit and/or vegatables. Or failing that, a carton of cheap orange juice.

But what should I find next to the five varieties of orange juice but peach juice, mango juice, lemon juice(!), lime juice and juice from fruits I couldn't actually identify. None of which I've ever tried from within cardboard.

So, with my cheap salami (Salam), cheap biscuits (Biskviti) and cheap chocolate (Choko :-)), I got some Sok of Kaisiya. On special offer.

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The BBC can be very useful sometimes. They do four weekly podcasts on aspects of English for learners. In fact, if learners consistantly made use of resources like this, EFL teachers wouldn't have much to do. Fortunately, the live teacher in the classroom still has a mistique about it.

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This particular English teacher (who has no mistique at all) is busy studying the details of his own language, and is getting the kind of feeling you get when you look at a familliar room from an unfamilliar angle.

For instance, the sentence "I used to travel" isn't a thing of hidden depths. It's in the present-simple form, with the pseudo-auxiliary verb "used" indicating a current state relating to something in the past - specifically, to action that was habitual but has now ceased.

The emphatic version "I did used to travel" looks clear enough - it's just the implied auxiliary "do" being made explicit, much as happens when the statement "I travel" is flipped around to become the quesion "Do I travel?". But there's a problem.

In English, where there's a string of verbs in a sentence - as in "I regretted to want to start to stop" or "I was able to begin to decide to cease to pretend to act" - the first verb (auxiliary or not) takes the past tense if there is one needed, and all the others are in the present. In these examples the "passified" verbs are "regretted" (past of "regret") and "was" (past of "is/am/are").

But here's there's two verbs in the past form - "did" (do) and "used" (use). And what's more, the present of "did" can't be used - "I do used to travel" is ungrammatical.

So, I'm a bit confused about that.

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Being here gives me the chance to do things I'd never do at home. Like...watch lots of episodes of CSI back to back. Um, yeah.

It's one of those shows that's quite enjoyable in its simple formula, non-characterisation and faux high drama. I find I can sit through each episode quite happily, in spite of its risible portrayal of science and its right-wing agenda - messages of "drugs make you murder" and "the end justifies the means but only for the good guys".

But...once I'm done with an episode, there's no sense that I'll ever want to see it again. It's all used up and spent. Which is not the stuff of cult TV, or TV you make time to watch.

Chewing gum for the eyes indeed. So I think I'll just have one more stick.

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One of the games I find myself playing a lot is "Supermarket Roulette". This involves trying to ascertain exactly what item is in what packaging, with only the pictures on the packs and a limited grasp of the language.

Bleach and detergent come in the same shaped bottles, and I don't recall the word for either, so I hunt around the brands looking for one with a picture of a washing machine or a shirt, and buy that one.

There's one product called "Ace" with the word "Automat" (both in roman letters) underneath. Which do you suppose it is? Or is it something else entirely? It turns out to be bleach.

Butter and cheese are stored next to each other, sometimes in similar packaging. Sometimes a quick squeeze will tell you which is which, but in this case I cheat and look at the labels - "Maslo" is butter and "Sirene" is cheese.

There's dozens and dozens of products called "Maioneza" - Mayonaise. I select one, thinking it'll go well with the "Klasik Khamburgski" - which isn't a classic hamburger, but a kind of pork salami - only to find it's prawn mayonaise. I'm dipping my bread in it.

And by the way I still can't pronounce the word for bread - "Khlyab".

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