Karen Sandler

Tag: english

  • Dance Camp!

    I’m heading off to a week-long dance camp today in Stockton, CA. This is an annual pilgrimage for my husband and me (and a 100+ other dancers from around the world). On the schedule this week are classes in Portuguese, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Israeli, Vintage, English Country, What’s Hot in Europe and Square dance. We stay in the dorms of the University of the Pacific and eat yummy (not so much) dorm food.

    Here’s what my piles o’ packing look like:

    You’ll notice the kitties are a little apprehensive of all the disarray. We have a great housesitter lined up to stay with them, but they don’t know that. They don’t like it when we leave.

    In the third picture, those big black bags are clothes on hangers. Since we’re at dance camp for a solid week and because we’re dancing our little footsies off for several hours a day, we need lots of changes. Plus there are parties every night, some of them that involve costumes. So hubby and I need lots of changes of clothes.

    I like to make sure each outfit–skirt, blouse socks (yes, socks with a skirt. You can’t wear dance shoes barefoot, and it’s mighty hot for hose)–to be color coordinated. So I put them together on hangers so when I go to the closet for an outfit, I don’t have to think about where everything is.

    Even still, in my don’t rock the boat/rock the boat fashion, I’ll probably end up mixing everything up. And there are also the bargain finds at the rummage sale which I might end up wearing.

    Here’s one of my coordinated outfits:

    On Wednesday of the camp, we all have pictures taken. It’s nice to wear a costume that night. Last year I got a screaming good deal at the silent auction on a German dirndl costume. At the live auction, I bought a complete lederhosen costume for my husband, so we’ll both be well outfitted for picture night. I am part German although I don’t know that my German Jewish great-grandmother would have ever worn a dirndl.

    I’m hoping I’ll have enough spare energy this week to post to my blog about the camp. My goal is every day, but it may end up being just a few times during the week. One limitation is exhaustion (have you ever danced 8-10 hours a day?). The other is that my grandbaby will be at camp this year for the first time and I hope to help babysit her. But with luck you’ll see posts from me complete with cool pictures.

  • Hablando en español

    I have been studying Spanish for a long, long time. For decades, if you start counting from the third grade when I was first exposed to el caballo, el gato, and el perro. In elementary school, we would watch a fifteen minute Spanish lesson on TV, where the teacher would bate, bate chocolate and sing Dos y dos son cuatro, cuatro y dos son seis… (which I just learned comes from a song by Stanley Lucero).

    I took Spanish all through high school, skipped it entirely in college (oddly, there was no foreign language requirement for my BA), then took classes here and there since then, some private, some not. I have a killer accent, probably because I started studying so young, but unless I’m kind of dumped into a situation where I have to speak only Spanish (like when I went to Mexico), I have to think really hard to say what I want to say.

    I bring this up because I just read about an interesting study where it was discovered that bilingual 8-month-old babies are better able to distinguish between two languages, even if they don’t speak either language. Better still, babies living in bilingual homes get a perceptual “boost” that will improve their thinking throughout their lives. Babies not exposed to a second language don’t have the same visual discrimination skills as bilingual babies do.

    Bilingual babies are apparently able to notice variances in how the face moves when a person is speaking one language versus another. Watching a muted video of people speaking French and English, for example, they could see differences in how the lips moved, how the jaw opened and closed and other facial changes. They’d get bored if a language they’d already been exposed to was repeated, but perk up if it was a new-to-them language.

    What’s also interesting about this is that learning a new language when you’re older is one way that’s supposed to fend off dementia. Bilingual Alzheimer’s patients are, on average, four to five years older. That is, being bilingual, they’re staving off the Alzheimer’s a few years longer.

    So, I’m going to keep studying español. Maintain those brain cells best I can. And speak Spanish to my beautiful granddaughter every chance I get.