After being bed-ridden last week without so much as a nurse maid to swab the pools of sweat from my forehead or to cook me a pot of my beloved chicken noodle soup when I wanted that sweet sweet grandma goodness, it was nice to get into some overallls and to plough a few fields. Not literally of course, I don't have a plough and its too icy outside. It was in fact, sitting around a warm kitchen table with a glass of port and some devine proscuitto snuggling a grape like a new born.
But how can you plough a few fields around a kitchen table you ask?
Agricola. The ultimate farming board game. Yee ha.
To give you a brief rundown of how it works, you have a farmer and his wife collecting resources like wood, clay and stone to build fences and barns to house sheep, wild boar and cattle. The animals really look special alas the farmer and his wife is simply a flat disk of coloured wood. So my blue flat farmers renovated the mud house, planted a few harvests and procreated along with the sheep! The choices were endless up until round 14 then what ever I had on my land was calculated and to my surprise I lost. Even though my farm was clearly the prettiest.
It made me entertain the idea that maybe I could be a farmer. A real one. Only the equivilant of a half a one though, because let's face it, I would no longer be living in the Land of Oz (no pun intended) I would tied to boulders in Kansas.
If only we didn't have to pay for land and everyone got a little share to build a little something on.
Wouldn't that be swell? Wait. Is this sounding a bit too much like utopia? Probably.
Well maybe I'll resort to growing my underarm hair and joining a commune to share the load - somewhere warm of course.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
A cracker to have with cheese, please....
This week, considering I'm practically sleeping at my work and 'teaching' whatever English nonsense bubbles out, I've decided to let you in on the quality of characters I teach and who never cease to amaze.
Koko Bis, whose actual name is Guy Phillipe on the role call is from the Ivory Coast in West Africa. He's about forty years old with not a wrinkle on his beaming, smiling face. In my class he has the loudest laugh I think I've ever had the privy in hearing and he takes a very, very long time in silence before he answers even the most basic question. In his personal life, he has three children who still live with their 'crazy' mother in Paris, his home for about fifteen years before he came to Montreal and he works six days as a butcher. He proclaims himself a special butcher, (why special - I still haven't got an answer) and a philosopher but to me he's got the goods of a class-A comedian.
Now, every Monday and Wednesday night for the last month I've seen Koko Bis tell the nine other students bits of his life story through a whiskey breath, which fortunately has reverted back to its original smell (his breath that is) due to the influence of his new Jamaican girlfriend. Not because she said so, I might add, because now instead of coming home to an apartment with only a bed, chairs and a table, he had a loving woman.
Two stories which spring to mind revolve around his illegal activities in France and his abscess.
As I mentioned before, Koko Bis lived in France for fifteen years. Fifteen illegal years, I should say.
But how could he do that? You ask. Wouldn't he eventually be caught by the police who travel in groups of three in France just waiting for an ethnic to walk down that street so they can demand their papers? Well, yes. And he was caught. Many times. But as Koko Bis will delight in telling to his avid listeners, he never had any fear of the police or the authorities and so they never cuffed him, booked him or threw him out of the country.
"You must respect them," he preached, before he told us of one time he got in a physical scuffle with them.
Perhaps his recipe of fearless respect was the perfect combination for a lineage of French cops...
And now to the final short story of the wonderfully entertaining Koko Bis.
His abscess. When he was a child of nine he developed a rather large abscess on his arm. His father was advised to take him to hospital promptly, which was many miles away. They tried many different medicines and treatments in the hope of not having to go to the hospital. When nothing worked Koko Bis grabbed a knife and sliced it open, much to his mother's horror. The family called him crazy which stuck with him until adult hood even though the action of piercing the protrusion not only let all the puss out but healed itself in three days.
So there it is.
A real cracker...
Koko Bis, whose actual name is Guy Phillipe on the role call is from the Ivory Coast in West Africa. He's about forty years old with not a wrinkle on his beaming, smiling face. In my class he has the loudest laugh I think I've ever had the privy in hearing and he takes a very, very long time in silence before he answers even the most basic question. In his personal life, he has three children who still live with their 'crazy' mother in Paris, his home for about fifteen years before he came to Montreal and he works six days as a butcher. He proclaims himself a special butcher, (why special - I still haven't got an answer) and a philosopher but to me he's got the goods of a class-A comedian.
Now, every Monday and Wednesday night for the last month I've seen Koko Bis tell the nine other students bits of his life story through a whiskey breath, which fortunately has reverted back to its original smell (his breath that is) due to the influence of his new Jamaican girlfriend. Not because she said so, I might add, because now instead of coming home to an apartment with only a bed, chairs and a table, he had a loving woman.
Two stories which spring to mind revolve around his illegal activities in France and his abscess.
As I mentioned before, Koko Bis lived in France for fifteen years. Fifteen illegal years, I should say.
But how could he do that? You ask. Wouldn't he eventually be caught by the police who travel in groups of three in France just waiting for an ethnic to walk down that street so they can demand their papers? Well, yes. And he was caught. Many times. But as Koko Bis will delight in telling to his avid listeners, he never had any fear of the police or the authorities and so they never cuffed him, booked him or threw him out of the country.
"You must respect them," he preached, before he told us of one time he got in a physical scuffle with them.
Perhaps his recipe of fearless respect was the perfect combination for a lineage of French cops...
And now to the final short story of the wonderfully entertaining Koko Bis.
His abscess. When he was a child of nine he developed a rather large abscess on his arm. His father was advised to take him to hospital promptly, which was many miles away. They tried many different medicines and treatments in the hope of not having to go to the hospital. When nothing worked Koko Bis grabbed a knife and sliced it open, much to his mother's horror. The family called him crazy which stuck with him until adult hood even though the action of piercing the protrusion not only let all the puss out but healed itself in three days.
So there it is.
A real cracker...
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