Los Danis

By Ewan

Thu, 25 Jan 2024
  • 260 reads
4 comments
 

[Sometime in late 2008]

Los Danis: cracking name for a boy band, but actually they are the two students I'm waiting for now. They work in the bank at the corner of the Cruz de la Misión. I'm a few hundred yards up the road in the bar with the cigar-store Indian outside. I like it, it's quiet during the day, a bit dark, but we're doing speaking and listening today. The other reason I like it is because it's like the places I always used to find when I wore the green grow-bag* in foreign parts. After a day on a military aircraft with 28 other people on board I liked to be on my own. At least some of the time.

So they're learning English, a useful skill in this part of Màlaga Province. 3 hours a week, whether they like it or not. The bank pays an agency and they pay me. Danis one and two seem to have some sort of class sharing scheme. I can count on the fingers of one finger the number of times both have appeared for a lesson. It's moot whether they have learned much in the last six months. Whichever one turns up, they will be late.  I get paid anyway. Meanwhile, I wait and drink beer in far more civilised quantities than ever I used to. If I'm unlucky the bar's owner will feed the snake he keeps in the corner. I'll watch, feeling faintly sick.

I wonder how long the bank will keep paying me, after the financial bombshell that hit the news yesterday.

*Affectionate, occasionally derogatory, reference to the Royal Air Force's issued flying suit.

Certificate U
Story
Driving Over Tinfoil (prose)
Biography

Comments

Submitted by Turlough on

I have similar experiences of language classes, though as the student rather than as the tutor, and it's small children kept in the corner that require feeding instead of snakes. Whatever happens it's always a million times more enjoyable than the miserable times I suffered learning French from a teacher with a Scouse accent in a 1970s concrete cancer council comprehensive school on a dodgy estate in Leeds.

When the sun's shining I love having a stab at talking foreign. 

Хубав ден!

Turlough

Submitted by Insertponceyfre... on

A good slice of life piece Ewan. Was this the financial crash? Something else? Did they go under?

 

Submitted by Ewan on

 My favourite male student, ever, was assistant manager in the same branch. I taught him from 2005 to early 2008 when he got a transfer to Fuengirola as manager. In one of his last classes, he explained that there was a crash coming and exactly why. I learned about sub-prime mortgages and how dumb all banks are from that.

He was a lovely guy, but I think he took the promotion because he had exhausted the supply of the eligible and not so eligible women in the town. Possibly one of the handsomest men I've ever met, he was always beautifully dressed. None of the women I spoke to had a bad word to say about him. The branch the two Danis worked in did much less business when Fernando left. I used to call him 'Can you hear the drums?'. We did laugh.

Author Page at the 'Zon
 

Submitted by Kris on

"occasionally derogatory, reference to the Royal Air Force's issued flying suit".

(no comment) & no swabby blasphemy here....

But the whole Màlaga area is a very cool & memorable place, then, now & more to come (fingers crossed).... IMO, keeping, finding, reflecting, in a diary, notes, etc. is something I wish I would of done more of.... In the photo zone for me, always had the latest image gadgets, still do..... Ashamed to admit, the only literary evidence of anything, was some graffiti in places I ain't ever confessing too.....  As it relates to this 1 Ewan.... 1 memory begets another...  angelwink