Testing Times

I had a test today, an Albanian test. My first language milestone. I was genuinely quite tense about it. We went out visiting a local family during the afternoon and all I could think about was the simple past conjugation of "to work". And when I got home it turned out I had it wrong anyway. But I have a very kind, extremely and stunningly beautiful teacher who was nice and didn't try to catch me out. Except on my vocab, which is poor. How could I think that pen was karrige when it is clearly kimik and karrige is chair. Ridonculous. As it was I did alright, check out the photographic evidenced. Signed by my teacher and everything.

The other thing that I know you're all wondering about it how the knitting is coming on. Well, I would like to introduce to my superb handywork. Or at least the gloves I made and the jumper I mentioned before.

This is the sorry excuse for the jumper. I just got round to sewing it up and have discovered (inevitably) that hardly any of the seams actually match up properly and so it's not really that wearable. I hoping Knitting Surgery with Mum will sort it. But it may be beyond repair. I'll keep you updated.

And here are the gloves. They look that weird in real life. But they fit people alright, some 10-12 year old girl will have warm hands soon enough!

Other recent excitment includes the visit of Carol's mum and sister last week. It was nice to have visitors and we got to do interesting things like day trips to Peja. The only problem I have found with being a tourist here is that I spend most of my time trying not to fall over in the snow/ice instead of looking at all the interesting things around me. But during our day in Peja we visited the 14th century monastery which really did look lovely in the snow. It was nice to experience snow as its supposed to be - beautiful and white, rather than town snow which just goes black and causes chaos.

The monastery is really old, and as it's Serbian it's protected by international troops. When we arrived Eileen asked the nice Italian soldier if we could visit it and he said "Speak English". She had, just Scottish English. Turns out they don't teach that to Italian soldiers.

And finally, today I discovered that, courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, I can listen to the cricket!! I spent this morning watching the snow and listening to Aggers extol the virtues of the England team. Happily the power went out during the afternoon which meant I didn't have to listen to the Irish turn up and win. Embarrassing. I've had a few conversations with the Americans here about cricket - they really do struggle with a game that can be played for hours and hours (or days and days) and end in a draw. It's clearly a refined art cricket, best left to the Commonwealth.

So you are brought neatly up to date with my world this week. Jolly good.