How do you spell "gossip"?

As I mentioned before, the other volunteers are young women from Japan. They speak English with varying levels of fluency and my Japanese ends at "Hello" and "Ticket, Please". Conversations are sometimes slow and often funny. They all work very hard at learning English and they take the opportunity to learn whenever they can.

Everyone is pleased that I'm Canadian, since my accent (I have an accent?) is easy to understand. Apparently, the previous English-speaking volunteer was from the UK and everyone had a lot of trouble communicating. All four of them are very nice and are teaching me stuff about the kitchen and the general routine. Three of them have those neat little electronic dictionaries. At night, when we sit around the table talking about various things, I'll use a word or phrase that they don't know so they ask me how to spell it and then all three type it into their dictionaries and there is a chorus of "ah" as each dictionary responds. It's hard sometimes to explain grammar rules that I've never studied ("I am going to study tomorrow" vs. "I will study tomorrow")or to give definitions for certain words - It reminds me a bit of the scene in Reality Bites when Winona Ryder's character is at a job interview and she is asked to define ironic - I can't always come up with a good definition, but I can use it in a sentence.


Oh, and there seems to be something about Brisbane and my email service. None of the multiple computers I have tried have been able to get to the Canoemail home page, or any of the Canoe websites. I had no problem in any of the other places I have been in Australia, so I don't know why. I have a set up a temporary account with another website and I have a friend who is forwarding everything - so I may take longer than usual to reply.

Hope everyone is having a good day and it isn't too cold wherever you are when you read this.