A glass of anthrax

This Monday I began a two-week intensive session of Spanish for Business. Somehow I landed myself in the highest group for this session. I’m not really sure how that happened, but from 9-12 each morning, I walk twenty minutes to the business school for three hours of immersion with our professor, Antonio.

Antonio is one of those rare professors who is a truly excellent teacher. He’s an older but very fashionable man (take note, American profs), and he’s here to teach us. Not to be our best friend. Not to make us think he is cool. To teach. We move at a grueling pace, and a lot of us get lost because we have never encountered business vocabulary in a Spanish class before. Heck, I don’t even know some of this business vocabulary in English. So, as you may imagine, my classmates and I make plenty of mistakes in class.

Occasionally these mistakes throw Antonio into a state of semi-despair, and he declares something like, “Quiero llorar. Quiero llorar por diez años.” Translation: “I want to cry. I want to cry for ten years.” I got one of those on Monday.  When he doesn’t want to cry, Antonio will ask someone for a glass of anthrax or for a jackknife so that he can cut off his fingers.  Today he threatened to stick his hand into the electrical box. While at first others seemed to be taken aback by such commentary, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The man has a sense of humor! I make a mistake, he wants to hurt himself, I laugh, and we move on. Antonio is absolutely brilliant, and I will be better off because of his rigorous pace.