I’ll never learn Spanish. The more I study, the worse I get.
Every morning when I wake up, the tune of La Bamba starts blasting in my head. My first conscious thought is Yo no soy marinero. From then on my brain is like a snow globe filled with randomly floating Spanish words: abrogado, estuve, para tomar, con frecuencia, soy capitan, soy capitan. Some I know, others I must’ve heard somewhere, and some I’ve almost certainly made up.
Luckily, natives are surprisingly patient with bad Spanish. It’s hard work to converse with someone like me, but nearly always people take the time to try, and it nearly always ends up in belly-laughter. Among today’s faux-pas-ses:
- I am made of purified water.
- Juan was sitting on the stovetop.
- I would like to buy something that is trash.
- I am a disaster.
At least I didn’t do that that one woman did on the Pacaya hike last week. She kept saying, “I want to ride that cowboy,” which is even worse than the time I kept saying to those Cuban men, “I have a man! I have a man!” when I was trying to tell them I was hungry.
When I ran into Don Toí±o this afternoon I chatted merrily in Spanish until he gently suggested, “Keep studying.”
On the bright side, I treat myself to an ounce of fresh macadamia nuts for a morning snack every day in la escuela.
At lunch I raced over to Maria’s to join her salsa lesson. An Irish dancer doing salsa? Bwah-hah-hah. But check out this action shot she took — I was getting some of the footwork right! However, encouraging arms and hips to waggle will take some doing.
Meanwhile, after only a few sessions Maria’s doing great.
Aside from an enjoyable dinner with Maria, it was an unspectacular day filled with banking (the first four ATMs were out of money), getting my ropa cleaned at the lavanderia, and visiting the mercado to buy presents for friends (who knows: maybe you’re one of them).
On the way home I got caught in a funeral: a mass of black-clad people, half a block long, creeping through the streets with a golden casket held aloft the middle. Silvia said it was a woman who’d died of breast cancer, and that regulations require (with some exceptions) that bodies be buried within 24 hours of death.
Another interesting Guatemalan custom: When someone sneezes once, they say salud. The second time: dinero. The third: amor. And the fourth, tiempo para todo. Tragically, I never get past two.
No one was at home when I got home tonight except this guy.
“I am made of purified water” made me laugh quite happily for a few minutes. You’re good for our amusement, if nothing more.
The sneeze thing! Thank you for posting about that. I learned that in a Spanish class, years ago, y siempre recordaba que el primero fue <>, pero me olvidaba las palabras siguientes, and I’d never remembered to look it up.
What a cute little spider. I put him there, just for you.