Excuse me while I cough...

From the Caribbean back to grey, cold, misty, gloomy Amsterdam - and a raging bronchial cough. It's so unfair. I've never smoked a single cigarette in my life - really, not even one - and here I am again with a cough that's turning my lungs inside out. Don't know whether it's Round 2 of the cold I had before going on holiday, my version of Bud's flu, the result of two weeks in an air-conditioned bedroom or the effect of going back to work and finding that everything's falling apart. Probably all of those and none. I have lungs that grew up in the damp north west of England in pea soup fogs...

You're special!
Just to make matters worse, my visitors statistics for this blog have plummeted in the past weeks. I'm not going to reveal figures. Let's just say that if you're reading this, you're part of an elite group. I'm really glad you called by!

So much for BlogExplosion. That only works if you keep throwing away vast tracts of time surfing through other BE sites. And it only seems to work for a couple of days. In other words, your site stats fill up with BlogExplosion visitors who've spent an obligatory 30 seconds on your blog in order to win some more credit (ie. visitors to their site). That said, I have found some very good sites via BE and it is maddingly addictive once you're on it. Guess I'll stay part of it and just go there now and again. But, from my experience, you can join without worrying about being run off the planet with visitors. The link's over there somewhere on the right if you want to try...

Say something interesting jj!
Yep, I guess that this isn't the juicy, tell-all, packed with humour type of blog that really grabs one's attention. I confess that I've even thought twice myself about coming back here. But it seems like, having created this little nook in cyberworld and made contact with some of you, it's just not the done thing to go off and forget about it.

Photos
There will be photos very soon, promise! We spent three hours the other night downloading half a dozen programms, only to discover that our archaic Windows 98 can't receive the photos without another gadget between camera and computer. How embarassing to admit we're still on Windows 98. So we're getting 2000 or XP and then it will all start to happen!

What I find exciting...
Right now is - now here I'm about to lose even my last faithful readers - the fact that I seem to have discovered a gift for picking up 'new' languages very fast, based on the ones I already know. I'm already managing to read a fair portion of the newspaper in Papiamento. And last night I read a couple of chapters of a book in Spanish. True, I've had Spanish lessons during lunch hours at the UN in Vienna years ago and have done something on it since. But I've never really learned it like I've learned German or French.

And the subject of the book is even more exciting (for me). It's called ' De una a cuatro lenguas' - Ok, you can read that too 'From one to four languages'. It's a revolutionary method, developed by a group of linguists across Europe, which enables a Spanish speaker, for instance, to read Portuguese, Italian and French - and eventuallyl, understand the spoken word in those languages.

Bud actually got the book for himself, from the library. But I'm riveted already. I find the idea that within a few months I might be able to read the Portuguese blogs I've bookmarked just, well, EXCITING!