Conversación español

This morning I got on my bike and joined some people in a high-rise appartment building (block of flats) by the canal who had met to practise their Spanish with Angelica from Chile. We came from Britain, Switzerland, Romania, the Ukraine, Canada, Jamaica and the Netherlands and spoke with varying degrees of fluency, my own Spanish very poor because I haven't attempted it for the last year or two. It will be a long while before I'm up to reading books by Isabel Allende in the original, but in the meantime, here's a stroke of luck. She is coming to speak to interested people at the National Art Gallery next week and I have acquired a ticket, not available to the general public, courtesy of the Chilean Embassy. Furthermore, she's going to give her lecture in English, so I'll be able to follow it without any difficulty.