This post is brought to you courtesy of the folks at Vacation Home Rentals.  Check them out for holiday rentals in the United States. As part of my preparation for the upcoming DELE exam, I’m refreshing my familiarity with all of the different accents in Spanish – they draw the listening test samples from any [...]

That’s right, a new language challenge!  I’m not sure if I’m excited or terrified:  Jose’s confident comment – “you’re more street than anyone, Cam, of course you’ll pass” – pretty much sums it up.  My Spanish is very barrio, and very barrio limeño at that.  My friends are all from Lima, and they’ve taught me [...]

  Earlier this year I published 7 Bands and Artists to Help You Learn Spanish over at Matador; as I argue in that article, music is an excellent addition to any language learning program.  After all, learning a language is really about learning a whole new culture.  So in the spirit of improving our language [...]

Reading in your target language is a wonderful way to improve your language skills, especially when you hit the intermediate/advanced plateau. It broadens your vocabulary and familiarises you with those more complicated grammatical structures. It opens a window on the cultural – and pop-cultural – context of the language. And it gives you a tiny [...]

Image: unojofuerte via flickr Sorry about the radio silence the last few days, everyone – Yamanyá Backpackers will be opening its doors in 12 days (!) so I’ve had my hands quite full (as an even cursory look at our still below par website will tell you).  Uni also started back this week.  What sound [...]

I’ve never been much of a believer in magic.  A friend and I spent three months terror-struck that we were being haunted by vengeful spirits after an ill-advised experiment with a ouija board back in my rather less skeptical youth, but a thoroughly scientific secondary and part-of-my-tertiary education has instilled a firm faith in the [...]

Wow, it’s been a while.  I do apologise…  for reason that I will, hopefully, be able to reveal this evening, I’ve been ridiculously busy the last little while – working in Bullfrogs 6 days a week, attempting to keep up with my work for the Spanish school, study, the mysterious project…  and, when I was [...]

I have finally done it – for the first time since I went to Pisac I have been on a daytrip outside of Cusco. Can you believe it? In my own defence I was rather busy, between Spanish classes and working two shifts a day in Pariwana, and spending my Sundays off far too hungover [...]

Given that I’m a travel addict and do quite a lot of it, I’m hideously bad at actually planning my trips. Not a great decision maker, me – I tend to make route decisions on a whim. Marseille because I had a sudden hankering for bouillabaisse, Livingston based on the unconfirmed rumour of a Garifuna [...]

Despite the certainty with which I concluded the last blog post, I have in fact decided to defer for twelve months. So here I am, working for free in a hostel in Cusco, very little money left, a flight ticket to cancel and yet another glorious year of (semi)-freedom before I need to contemplate once [...]