Learning the Language...

I thought I had a pretty solid grasp of the Spanish language before I came here; smiling and staring blankly at the teacher in most of my classes helped me slide under the radar of the last five years of Spanish classes. Living in a different language however, is a completely different challenge. The easiest errand can become the most difficult and impractical chore, and at the same time, a seemingly impossible task can become the most simple if you just ask someone politely. The accent here in Cadíz is supposedly the most difficult to understand in all of Spain; these Andalusians leave out "s," they lisp, they speak really quickly, and they use abbreviations like they're going out of style. You can't really comprehend the difficulty in understanding idiomatic expressions and slang until you try and learn them in a different language. For example, the expression "oh, that girl doesn't have a grandma" is meant to describe a girl who needs excessive praise and compliments, because here in Spain, the grandmas usually shower their granddaughters in compliments about their looks. I learned to just nod and smile until they caught on and finally explained it to me. Luckily, they're all really friendly and relatively patient. The fact that we're from California also helps win them over. Just the other day, we taught a few kids (Miguel Angel and Antonio) how to play frisbee. While a few things might have been lost in translation, I'd like to think that they had fun. The kid has quite the arm. I talked to his mom, and he's getting a frisbee for his birthday at my request.


Word of the Day: Guay - Cool
El partido de frisbee de ayer fue muy guay. (The frisbee game from yesterday was cool.)