My boiler and the polyglot repairman

The adversity

In the past few days our Baxi Eco 1240i wall-hung gas boiler hadn’t been working. (Now it is :))))
It was terrible, you know, 21th century, Europe (right, Eastern ....), and you don’t know when you will have heating with minuses outside? With my granny 88 who keeps panicking every now and then (although she’s an absolutely fantastic person, who has survived all the calamities of the last 88 years of Eastern Central Europe).
I was feeling really bad, I was worried about Granny,  multiple repairmen said so many different things, had to cancel lessons, the least negative thing was feeling cold.
To ease the stress I kept posting it all on Facebook, trying to apply a coat of fun :).  What helped me immensely was my friends' reactions: likes, comments, messages, chats. Thank you ever so much for everyone really, it means so much to me! I can’t express. *.*

The way out

Altogether 3 repairmen saw it, there have been various diagnoses and treatments, with potential costs of €600-700 or €230 or €nobodyknew.
You won’t believe it, finally I paid €35.
But the miracle of the whole story was the pleasure of meeting the amazing man who finally fixed it for so cheap.
The guy with the screwdrivers turned out to be the ex-owner of a translation agency, speaker of at least 8 languages, having multiple jobs and businesses (something like Seamus McSporran from an early edition of Headway Elementary, but in big), having travelled the world and worked in several countries. (Now I had the chance to hear how to get beer and make friends with the waiting staff in Arabic, Greek, Russian, Polish, Italian, ....., I couldn’t memorize all of that though.)  He told me stories of how knowing languages actually earned him money. :)

I was just listening to him with my jaw on the floor and of course asked him why and how. (In Hungary it’s quite unusual to speak foreign languages, that is.) I thought he had been a bilingual kid or been brought up abroad or something. No. His career as a language learner started when he was 14 and went to a nearby Prussian-style gymnasium, where he chose to learn English but he was streamed to the Latin group out of some reason. He said the secret lies in the quality of his teachers who spoke 8 languages, Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient Greek, ....  (Saying that teaching a dead language using the strict grammar-translation method results in polyglot problem solver????)
Then he put forward his idea of the ideal (low cost-high efficiency) language course:

• Go to the L2 country
• Meet your teacher in a cafe
• Your teacher gives you a task, for example “You have one hour. Go out to the city and ask people what they think of the weather here. Ask as many people as you can.”
• Then go back in an hour and report on what you have learned.

Yesss!!! This is something I can more than relate to, also similar to something I’ve already heard about last summer (Devon Unplugged SOL Course) and very similar to what Mark Andrews is doing right at the moment , if I’m not mistaken :))

Phew

So finally the heating problem has been solved, thank God my granny got over it without catching a cold.
If you ask me, these couple of days of uncertainty, cold and lessons cancelled were truly worth it. Through listening to the repairman's anecdotes I learned a lot ...  I usually learn easier from experiences and human encounters. 
I'm grateful.

Hmmm..... sigh of relief and the excitement of having met that marvellous character .... Warm radiators...  

What do I deserve now?? :)