Spanish Immersion Classes

 

I’ve started my second week of study at the San Pedro de Alvarez Spanish School.  And guess what, I am not yet fluent.  However, thanks to the patience of my wonderful teacher, Senora Cristy, I am indeed learning! 

I’ve written many, many sentences using all the Spanish verbs she keeps giving me and practicing conjugation.  For me, the hard part are the in-between words: the prepositions and the interjections that make language flow smoothly, but which don’t really follow any rules or reason.  For example, when to use de, a, or en after a verb to indicate from, to, in, on, about, in the direction of, etc.

To make it more complicated, my brain has been interjecting Hebrew every now and then.  I keep asking Senora Cristy, “mah ze?” instead of “que es esto?” for “what is this?”  or answering someone with “keyn,” for “yes.”  Which just means they stare at me and look at me funny for a few minutes.  David has done it too, sometimes mid-sentence without even realizing it.  I think it just goes to show you that when you learn another language as an adult, it just sits in the “THS IS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE” section of the brain and never fully gets integrated. 

The school believes in one-on-one learning, which means you can’t really lose focus or stop paying attention.  It is set in a beautiful courtyard garden with several resident tortugas.  Students from all over the world come - I have met folks from Germany, the Netherlands, and England, but mostly the US.  They stay as little as one week or as long as several months.  Throughout the garden, student and teachers sit at small tables across from one another practicing speaking, conjugating verbs, reviewing vocabulary.  There is frequent laughter, so it is a pleasant and friendly atmosphere.  People are here because the want to be- nothing at all like middle school or high school language classes in the US.

Class starts promptly at 8:00 a.m. and we work until 10:00 when a bell is sounded to indicate its time for a break.  I’ve become fond of a small pasteleria (bakery) across the street that makes delicious flaky pastries filled with fig jam – muy delecioso!  Then at 10:30 its back to work until 12. 

Mi Maestra, Senora Cristy (my teacher Senora Cristy)

The school garden/patio

The garden in the school is very lush, with  banana tree, an orange tree and an avocado tree.

More of the school, tables where students and teachers sit and the low cages on either side of the walkway for the resident tortugas

Sometimes, the school organizes activities to learn about the culture and life of the local community. 

This week, one morning, the entire school walked to a nearby church for a food exposition.  Put on by a local cooking school established to help empower young women from the surrounding communities, the exposition featured displays of food items (available for purchase) from the different regions of the country.  Senora Cristy and I walked around each table and she explained to me the different foods, ingredients, and methods of cooking.  Knowing that I like to cook myself and having already taught me several of the words for the herbs in my garden, Cristy was excited to show me examples of what we had been discussing in class.   We then bought several samples and I invited Cristy back to the apartment for a quick and early lunch.  I was very excited to be able to welcome her into my home – as you know - an important part of my identity is hospitality and hosting.  We finished, cleaned up and went back to the school for more verbs!  All of this was within a few blocks of each other, which is a lovely aspect of this small city of Antigua.

Tortillas cooked on a big open stove - using white, yellow and black maize.
 

Mole con Platanos (plantains in mole sauce (yum!)

Tamales wrapped in banana leaves

Tamalitos de Elote: small, sweet tamales that taste like sweet corn bread. 

So, learning Spanish is hard, but it is coming along.  I made one trip to the market myself during the week, bought several vegetables and even a new bra!  And somehow, I made myself understood without too much difficulty.  I can order and ask for things in restaurants (muy importante)!  Today, on our trip to the volcano (see later posting) we had two guides who mostly spoke to us in Spanish, and I was able to understand much of what they told us and ask a few reasonably well put together questions.  The funny part of it was that one of the guides, Luis, has taken many Israelis on hikes up the volcano, and he knew a few key words in Hebrew as well.  At the end of the day, it was all “Sababa!”