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As an adult,  you forget how you first learnt English when you were in primary school– you forget that the teacher had to devise endlessly quasi-fun, quasi-nerdy games to facilitate your learning; you forget that all the knowledge you have today in terms of the words you know, how well you write, and how you speak is actually a result of years of direct and indirect learning both at school and from everything else you came into contact with along the way.

Today, in order to drill the various case endings that apply to adjectives depending on the gender of the word, we played a game called “What would you pack with you?”

One person started with the tennis ball and had to say “I would take

[insert adjective and the object you would take]” and then throw the tennis ball to someone else.  Person 2 would then have to say “I would take:”, recite what person 1 said they’d take, and then add their own item. The tennis ball was thrown to everyone and each person would recite all the previous items, and add their own– until Santoko was the last to be thrown the tennis ball. It got epically long, and at the end of it, as a class, we decided to take (and poor Satoko had to recite): an interesting book (our teacher), a blue umbrella (Elisha),  a small dictionary (Jose),  a bottle of water (Nuria), a pissed-off cat (Alec), a green apple (Jeremy), red pants (Alex), a mobile phone (Yu Xin), a dark jacket (Nancy), a big coffee (Anita), a watch (Jorje), a red lipstick (me), a pretty towel (Fernanda), and a very comfortable chair (Satoko).  We were half rolling with laughter by the end of it, and then we had to take a tour of the library to calm down.

After lunch, Celine, Aubrey and I lay in the park. The sun is shining and it’s a beautiful day. We came across one solitary, gigantor golden leaf– and I loved it,  so I took a picture before reverently bestowing it upon Aubrey– apparently, they don’t have trees with giant leaves in Michigan, where she’s from.  I was also charmed by a bunch of posies in someone’s bike seat, and the grand Herz-Jesu-Kirche, which is my compass, and, to my directionally challenged brain, my saviour– and so they are also captured in today’s montage.

Word of the day: Lippenstift,  meaning lipstick– because I love my lipsticks so.