Finished my tanka project (and my first Real Book™ in Japanese) successfully!
Also picked up some more real life responsibilities, so language learning has had to take a bit of a backseat lately .
I’ve been catching up on La Ciudad de las Bestias book club, but not as fast as I would like to be catching up. I feel like I’m more not falling further behind rather than catching up…
Here are my week 2 thoughts, and my week 3 thoughts.
Besides that, pretty much all of the rest of my exposure to Spanish lately has been through listening to Radio Ambulante. There were a couple episodes I just listened to about Venezuela: Adiós, bolívar and El apagón. It got me thinking about Venezuela and the economic situation there.
Ten years ago, the thing that introduced me to the concept of hyperinflation was this Atlantic article called My Hyperinflation Vacation. The piece left an impression on me because it seemed like such a scummy rich person thing to do, basically exploiting another country’s misfortune and taking advantage of extreme economic inequality to get a cheap vacation for yourself without meaningfully helping the other country in any way…
I doubt Venezuela is a popular vacation spot even for the greediest and most callous of tourists, but I couldn’t help but think about that piece when reading about Venezuela off and on in the years that followed, just the weird things that hyperinflation can do to an economy.
My brother is a big Old School RunesScape player, and he’s how I found out that apparently the economic crisis in Venezuela has driven a lot of people to make a living by (illegally) gold farming in RuneScape (here’s an article about that).
So I thought about that a lot when listening to the Radio Ambulante episode on Venezuela and cryptocurrency. I wonder if I’ll eventually hear one about RuneScape, too…
I guess that’s all I have to say for this update! Hopefully I’ll be able to un-backburner Spanish at some point and get back to doing more reading again!