The last week here has been amazing, I must say. Four weeks is a tricky amount of time to be somewhere because it´s time to go just as you´re getting settled and really beginning to dig into things.
But I am leaving on a high note! I had my test yesterday (to assess my knowledge of the second level), and I got a 100! Best in the class, teacher´s pet, and all that. Needless to say, it was a good decision to move out of Hermaaaaan´s class; my new teacher, Victoria, was excellente. Very patient and a very slow speaker.
After class yesterday, there was a small "graduation" celebration up on the roof terrace of the school. They have these every Friday (because people are leaving every Friday), and when you get your "diploma" you are expected to say something in Spanish. I am proud to say that I very coherently said that I had learned a lot and was very thankful for my profesors. I can speak!
I DO think my Spanish is getting much better. On a break during class yesterday, one of my classmates asked me why I was so good at Spanish, and I told her, I´m not so sure you´re right about that. But then all my other classmates chimed in, "No, you are really good...for four weeks? Never having had any Spanish before?" So I´m not sure why this is. I think it´s incredibly helpful that many of the words aren´t really new to me. Even if I don´t know a word, I can make a good guess. Just take the English word I know and add a -amente or -ico onto the end of it. Sometimes I am right - other times I just invent new Spanish words.
Maybe those mortifying six years of Latin did come in handy after all. Roots, roots!
I can very safely say that in four weeks here, I have easily learned more Spanish than I learned French during my FOUR semesters at Indiana. That´s crazy! But it´s true. I am officially anti learning a language in college. It´s the most pointless venture ever. The only way to do it is the way I´m doing it - you have to be forced to speak it every day or it´s just random vocabulary words and memorization. The language needs to be meaningful and useful to you in order for you to USE it.
I had a little farewell dinner with my first profesor, Juan Manuel, on Thursday night. The rule of the evening was that I had to speak in Spanish the whole time and he in English (because he wanted to practice, too). His English is much better than my Spanish - he can string meaningful sentences together pretty quickly and easily while I feel like I am painfully slow. (I have a smart computer up there - it´s just a little slow!) I´d say it was a successful evening because we managed to talk about real stuff and not just, "Mi nombre es Ellen. Soy de Los Estados Unidos. Tengo 26 años." But it is an interesting process to have to use the limited vocabulary you have to say what you want to say. I find that my speech in English is very complicated - I use all the verb tenses you could possibly use and add in unnecessary words to make my speech sound pretty or intelligent. But here, I search for the most basic formula to express myself. It´s such a delightful simplification.
During the course of the evening, Juan made an interesting observation. He said that he is getting to know a very unique version of me - one that none of my friends at home will ever know - because this me is forced to think before speaking and to speak slowly and carefully. He gets to watch the wheels turning up there, as I search for the correct verb conjugation. To me, I think my friends back home are just being spared a very stupid version of me, but to him, he´s watching a work in progress. He´s getting to witness this big change in me. And that´s pretty neat.
I had a big, fun last night with some old and new amigos. I stayed out way too late, but it was easily worth it for the conversations had. It was an amazing feeling (amazing!) to be sitting outside on a Friday night, in a big plaza full of people and noise, and to stop and look around and take in this new life of mine. Six weeks ago, I was still immersed in routine and familiarity, hardly aware of what was ahead of me. I spent last night with an entire set of people I did not know existed six weeks ago.
We are in control of our lives, I think. We can make these things happen for ourselves. We can make change and introduce new lives to ours, but we have to choose to do it. It´s fantastic.
In just over three hours, I will be taking off to Bariloche via bus! It´s a 22 hour bus ride, but these buses are supposed to be really nice and have fully reclining seats. I am really looking forward to the ride - to relaxing and looking out the window and taking in some new scenery.
Tomorrow afternoon, I will be moving in with a new family. And it´s a whole family with a mom and a dad and two adolescent sons. Eek! Will report on that asap.
So now it´s time to finish packing, say goodbyes to Rosa (who, by the way, has taken to calling me "The Princess" - I could get used to that!) and head on down the road. I am a bit sad because new people have been introduced recently that I wanted to know and I am still wanting to know the old people better, but it´s nice to be certain that there are new folks ahead.
Hope everyone´s having a good weekend. Below are a few random noticings I collected over the past few weeks that need to be said before I go.
Okay, this may sound bad, but...There are these signs at a bunch of the bus stops here that have a picture of a person without an arm or a leg. The caption reads, "Una persona sin derechos, no es una persona." My first two weeks here, I was horribly confused by this. The one word I didn´t know in the caption was "derechos," and by using the context clues, I thought it must mean limbs. A person without limbs is not a person? How could they be saying this?? Finally, I figured out that derechos are rights, not limbs... And now I giggle every time I walk by one of those signs.
You are generally not supposed to flush anything, including toilet paper, down the toilet. There are these lovely reminder signs everywhere, but until you actually try to remember not to throw the paper in the toilet, you will not believe how hard it is. Every time I sit down, I say to myself, I will not flush the toilet paper, I will throw it in the trash can. And then without even thinking, I am standing up, turning around to flush the toilet, and looking down at that silly toilet paper, that i´ve just thrown into the toilet. It happens to me EVERY time. This is a hard habit to break.
There are no laws requiring people to clean up after their dogs here, so there is dog poop EVERYWHERE. You really, really have to pay attention when walking down the sidewalk.
Apparently, all over the world, there´s a different description for the sound a rooster makes. My teacher was trying to explain to us the Spanish word for rooster, and she said it´s an animal that says, "Kee Kiri Kee". And we all just looked at her like, huh? We figured it out eventually. I said, in the US, we say, "Cockle Doodle Doo", and then the Swedish people said what it was in their country, and the Canaidian woman said what it was Canada. Who knew?
Okay, that is it, and that is all. Chau!
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