实战口语情景对话 第827期:The Shack 乡村小木屋

Yuri: So Shirley, you were talking about the shack. Can you tell me some more about it?
尤里：雪莉，你之前说到了乡村小木屋。你能详细说说吗？

Shirley: OK, well, the shack — not as horrible as it might sound. I was actually born in the city, and yeah, grew up on the edge of the city of Glasgow, and my parents ... maybe I was about seven or eight years old ... my parents decided they would buy this little wooden house in the country side, only about forty-five minutes drive from where we lived, but right in the countryside, and it was really basic. It was huge. It looked like a barn, and my parents wanted to try and make it into something livable like a holiday house that we could go to on the weekends and summer holidays and stuff, so anyway we went there ... for the first time we went, it still looked like a barn, and had some beds in it and stuff like that, but no running water, no electricity, no toilet, no bath, no shower. It was like a barn in the middle of nowhere, so as you know, me and my brothers, we are kind of raised in the city, and although, you know we were kids way before video games and iPods and things like that, there was no TV. That was the biggest tragedy. There was no TV, and we though what on earth can we do up here? It's like we're in the middle of nowhere, how boring this summer holiday's gonna be, so we just had to you know, try and figure out how we we're gonna enjoy this holiday and what could we do with no television.
雪莉：好，小木屋，其实并不像听上去的那么可怕。我出生在城市，在格拉斯哥市边缘长大，在我七八岁的时候，我父母决定买下这个乡村小木屋，那里离我们住的地方只有40到50分钟的车程，因为在乡村，所以木屋的设施很简单。那座木屋非常大，看上去像谷仓，我父母想把小木屋改造成适宜居住的房子，供我们在周末或暑假期间度假使用，我们第一次去那里时，那座小木屋依然看上去像个谷仓，里面有几张床，但是没有自来水，没有电力，也没有卫生间，没有浴室，没有洗澡设备。那就像在偏远地区的一个谷仓，你知道，我和我哥哥是在城市长大的，虽然我们小时候没有电子游戏或iPod这样的娱乐设备，可是小木屋连电视都没有。那真是最大的悲剧。那里没有电视，我们到底还能在那里做什么？就好像我们身处一个偏远的地方，我们当时想，这个暑假得有多无聊啊，所以我们只能试图寻找能享受这个假期的方法，寻找除了看电视以外能做的其他事。

Yuri: Yes, exactly, what did you do? How did you spend you days?
尤里：那你们做了什么？你们是怎么度过假期的？

Shirley: We were out in the country side. I mean, you just need to go out and look, and there's so many possibilities to have fun: making tree houses, making dens out of the woodland ferns and things like that, going on searches for frogs. We seemed to do that a lot. Poor frogs. We made like a tennis court out in the front of the ... we called it the hut. Right, I keep calling it a barn or a shack, but actually what we called it was a hut, although it was a really huge kind of wooden house, and so yeah, we made up a kind of a tennis court and when it wasn't raining we could play tennis. We had to go collect water from a well near like, I don't know, maybe four hundred meters away, and we'd always have to go in twos because of course there's always an argument with kids. I did it last time. He has to do it this time. So we always had to go in pairs to get the water. For lights we'd just use a gas lamps. For cooking it was a kind of two stove ... two ring stove, connected to a gas bottle. We did have television, which was powered by a car battery, so we would save that until Saturday night, because always on a Saturday night there was a movie, so we would save the car battery power for the Saturday night movie, and it would usually last until the end of the movie.
雪莉：我们在乡下玩耍。去外面看看你就会发现，有很多可以玩的：建造树屋，用森林里的蕨类搭个小房子，找青蛙。我们好像经常这么做。青蛙太可怜了。我们在木屋前面做了个网球场。我一直称那是谷仓或是小木屋，不过那其实是非常大的木屋，我们做了个网球场，不下雨的时候我们可以打网球。我们要去附近的水井里打水，水井离我们的木屋大概有400米，我们一般两个人一起去打水，因为孩子之间经常会吵架。比如，上次是我去打的水，这次得你去。所以我们会两个人一起去打水避免这种争吵。我们用煤气灯照明。用炉子做饭，那里有两个和煤气罐连接的炉子。其实我们有一台用汽车电池提供电力的电视，我们要把电力留到周六晚上才用，因为周六晚上放电影，所以我们要把汽车电池留到周六晚上看电影用，电力可以持续到电影结束。

Yuri: So it was a bit like camping.
尤里：就像露营一样。

Shirley: Yeah, yeah, I suppose but like camping, only thankfully we didn't get wet when it rained.
雪莉：对，没错，是像露营一样，幸运的是，下雨时我们不会淋湿。