El Aprendizaje de Shannon

So, I've been wanting to do some word art for a long time (after seeing some Wordle work on my friend's blog), and I wanted to do it with some of the words I've learned in Spanish from reading Harry Potter. I had WAY too much fun learning words from reading Harry Potter, and I think I can owe a lot of that to reading all the books WITHOUT a dictionary. I didn't look up a single word (well, maybe ONE). I just wanted to read for fun, and if I didn't know a word, I'd just check out the context and then skip it (thank you, 6th grade English for teaching me about context clues!). So by the end, words that I used to have no idea about started to kind of make sense. I owe a lot to este chico Harry Potter, I love it when, say, someone says "Hey, that passport applicant, did he come back in?" And I say "Oh, the one with the limp?" [Internal dialogue -- "Wait, how do I know how to say 'limp?' Oh yeah, Mad Eye Moody, book 4!"] So exciting! I love learning languages, and right now I'm trying to decide if I'd like to learn another language next or go spanish-speaking again and keep working on it. Or go English speaking -- I mean, how could I complain if I got sent to New Zealand, say? But I won't get the list-of-possibilities until August or September, so until then.....I'll just keep enjoying el ESPANOL!!! :) Here's my list of favorite words and phrases from La Serie de Harry Potter!

Xìngyùn bǐnggān

I hope I didn't just say something bad/awkward in Chinese. I think that's the romanization of the chinese word for fortune cookies. Which actually originated in San Francisco (the fortune cookie, not the romanization).

This post is to put to rest any ideas that I have Chinese ancestry (I don't, though I was asked if I did at the last Embassy gourmet night, when you were supposed to bring either a food from the land of your heritage OR one you really liked) and to show that I wasn't bluffing before about making fortune cookies. I made them again!

Clouds

I'm on a cloud kick lately. They do some really cool things here. Lately I've been noticing at sunset how the clouds in the foreground will turn really dark, and then as the sun sets somewhere behind them, the sky in the background lights up, orange, pink, red. It's pretty cool. Happened Saturday, I was reading a book, and it was getting darker and darker, when all of a sudden it was like someone turned on a lamp behind me, the sky behind the clouds had turned a bright orange. And it did something similar to that again tonight (see above), though not quite as dramatic. Still cool, though, eh?