On Language

 A lot of people asked me if I spoke Spanish before I flew down here. I would answer 'yes' and though I took 5 years of Spanish in high school, it felt like a lie when I was saying it. About six weeks later it doesn't feel like a lie anymore, and that's a better feeling. The five years of class did count and so did a couple vacations over the years and so did working at Sealed Air and so did Dan Montagna live-translating song lyrics into Spanish here and there. A lot of vocab has come back to me or I can pick it up in context. The tough part is remembering that word the next time I need to use it myself. You can pick up vocab all over the place. Something I'd been trying to recall for the last few days was the Spanish for 'to show'. I was using my friend Cat's cellphone to call my friend Tim and 'mostrar' was the option for one of the buttons, Show. As far as conjugation, I'm pretty good with present, present participle, past and future. I need work with pronouns. Sentences laden with la, le, les, me, te, and se usually throw me for a loop even when I'm on board with the subject, object and verb.

My attitude with speaking Spanish is much the same as it is with cooking. I'm happy to let someone else do it if they know how, but I can do it, and I will if need be. That said, I do very much enjoy and practice listening in Spanish. My cooking and Spanish hover around the same skill level as well. There's a strong base but I could stand to sprinkle in some flavoring around the edges. I'm certainly not dreaming in Spanish yet but I did inadvetenly address one of the animals in Spanish. I was excited for a swim we were to have in the lake and I asked one of the dogs "¿Quiere nadar?", "Do you want to swim?" I have realized there is a distinct on/off switch in my head for listening to Spanish. I must either actively focus all my concentration on translation or it's all a bunch of garbaldegook in the background.

While in Thailand, Cambodia and India, I was resigned to not speaking the language more than hello and thank you. I enjoyed those countries immensely despite the barrier between myself and locals when it came to any real conversation. I never had a problem navigating around and I certainly had no trouble getting fed. Being able to add to a warm smile a variety of greetings and further exchanges depending on the circumstance certainly adds worlds to the travel experience. I chat with locals about anything and everything and take impromptu, informal Spanish lessons wherever I can find them.

My mother reminded me it was possible that the locals here may speak with a thick, difficult to interpret accent. It turns out the opposite is true. Around Lake Atitlan live mostly Mayan people. There are 24 Mayan languages in use in Guatemala. I'm not sure how they're divided up, but in certain places, they're quite localized. In San Marcos de la Laguna, where I've been living, the people speak X'Chi Kel. The next lake town to the west is San Pablo de la Laguna and it's a 15-minute trip in a tuk-tuk and less in the boat. In San Pablo, the people speak Chi Kel, a different language with some overlap.

I'm guessing at the transliterated spelling of X'Chi Kel and I don't have internet, it's pronounced kek-chee-kel and the language uses lots of throaty clicks and stops. Just about all the locals speak both X'Chi Kel and Spanish. For the Mayan people here, Spanish is a second language and as such, they speak very clearly. The Spanish is much easier to understand here than in the Sealed Air break room populated with Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. I've heard people say Guatemala is the best place for learning Spanish. As I was beginning to feel a little better about my skills, we got a new Yoga teacher, Lilliana, from Mexico. I have to try a lot harder to pick up what she's saying.

I couldn't say if some of my favorite expressions are unique to Guatemala, but here they are nonetheless. For money, 'la plata' is preferred over 'dinero'. Buenos Dias, Buenas Tardes and Buenas Noches are standard, and you'll often hear one of these shortened to simply 'Buenas' with the first syllable more drawn out for this abbreviated greeting. After I wish the tienda clerk a good evening, she will often reply with 'igualmente'. In Xela, also known as Quetzeltenango, I learned a nice way to address someone is with either mi reina or mi rey, my queen or my king. This is very charming with our lunch cook, Petrona. With Petrona's husband, Noe, he is more of a 'vos'. "Mire, vos..." is like "Look, man..." or "¿Que piensas, vos?" is like "What do you think, amigo?".

I very much enjoy absorbing the idioms and lingo from the English speakers of the world as well. My friend Cat is from England and has spent a lot of time in Wales. Understanding her can be worse than Spanish. Several times a day, she "can't be asked" to do something like climb stairs or yell at Petrona for serving lunch late. Usually, she hasn't been asked and does the job anyway. I love hearing another English buddy, Tom, exclaim "Bloody hell, man!" especially when he's speaking with a woman. Raisins are sultanas, a flashlight is a torch, a period is a full stop, I am lo Maximo, a vest is a singlet, a hoodie is a jumper, sneakers are trainers and eggs are eggs. An Australian friend Laura described bagels as "morish" and for Tim, from Maryland, and myself, this invoked Shakespeare and Iago. Bagels are morish because you always want more of them. In the internet cafe, two women were on computers to my left. The closer one got up and told her friend she was going to go get chocolate. The other lady was too facebooked to hear her and the first woman repeated herself and the second woman laughed and said "Oh, you're going to get chocolate." When she said chocolate, it sounded exactly like Laura. I said, "You're from Melbourne." and she said "That's right." Without using any colloquiallisms, sometimes Australians just say ridiculous things like, "The Rock is an amazing actor."


Hasta later. I must vamos.