By Katie L-S, October 29th, 2006
I got myself into an argument the other day about Algerians, muslims, and immigration. My opponent was against all of the above, and his blatant generalising really rubbed me up the wrong way. But it got me to thinking about why I support the case of Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui, given that, as an atheist, we have a rather different worldviews.
By Katie L-S, October 29th, 2006
As well as taking Spanish classes three times a week, I have just started a course at a university here on Political Violence in Cinema. There are about 30 of us in the class, mainly political studies students from the uni, and each week we watch a film that deals with political violence and then sit around and discuss it. It’s just my thing, I’m finding it very interesting and also pretty challenging. In the first class, we watched “Estado de Sitio”, which is a docudrama about the kidnapping of a US, erm, political operative, shall we say, in Uruguay in the early 1970s.
By Katie L-S, October 23rd, 2006
Living largely in Spanish, and giving classes in English has made me reflect on the way we use language: the ease with which we use our native tongue, and the way we modify it depending on who we are speaking with. I know nothing about linguistics, but am finding it interesting to ponder the subject, and I’m interested to hear your ideas on it too.
By Katie L-S, October 7th, 2006
I set aside all of Thursday morning to apply for my “Foreigners Identification Number” (NIE), essentially a barcode which I need in order to be paid. (Bear in mind that the Spanish morning generally lasts until 2 or 2.30pm). I’d heard some horror stories about the officials’ vaguely unhealthy adherance to the rules, and on Wednesday around 11am I’d been to the Police Station where these golden tickets are issued and not been able to face waiting in a queue that stretched out of the station, down the street twenty metres or so, across the road and back up the opposite side.