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as limited as a newly-learned language
Wednesday, March 15 2006
setting: Quetzaltenango, Guatemala
Somehow this day of class was better than yesterday, if only because of my expanded vocabulary. I've really been studying and the studying has been
working. I'm finding that it only takes a few passes through a deck of vocabulary words before I know all the words in the deck.
After class a few of us got together at the Blue Angel, a café very close to Celas Maya.
It's a good place to do Spanish homework and maybe drink a lukewarm Gallo (the most ubiquitous beer of Guatemala - it comes with a rooster logo on its can or bottle). Mercifully, most of our classmates have discontinued the charade of speaking to each other only in Spanish. We're just too interested in what each other are really like to rely on a communication system as limited as a newly-learned language. It turns out that people who go to Guatemala for several weeks to learn Spanish have a lot more in common with each other than they do with the people they leave behind in their home countries. Such people tend to be politically liberal, culturally open-minded, and (of necessity) flexible in their careers. Nearly all of our new friends at Celas Maya are Estadounidensos, but they're Estadounidensos like us, which are few and far between in the Estados Unidos itself.
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