I would just like to take this opportunity to tell the entire internet how much I adore Mexico. I’m just back from an awesome trip to the Baja and I love the people, the color, the light (and the food, the culture, the wild landscape, and lots more but I don’t want to bore your pants off, suffice to say LOVE IT!).
Color! shape! light! ok it might just be me with this picture, but I like it
And I hope I get to go back before another thirteen years have passed. But on to the bloggy bit.
I’ve been thinking about language. English is most definitely my first and sadly the only language I can claim any fluency in. And I have always always wanted to speak another language. I am ridiculously jealous of my four and half year old niece who speaks Mandarin and English perfectly and with wild swirling kid speed. Right now her conversations are mostly about mermaids and Wonderpets, but I’m pretty sure ten years from now she’ll be taking over the world. But that’s another post for another day
So I’m in Mexico and I don’t speak Spanish. I like to think I do, you know, at least un poquito. I can say hello, find the bano, ask “how much is this fish?,” but I can not actually speak Spanish and it makes me irrationally irritated — irrationally, because I never actually learned Spanish, so why on earth should I be able to speak it!? I took Spanish 1 for nine months in eighth grade, then a summer of German, three years of high school French, a semester of college German, but no more Spanish.
So why am I irritated that I can’t speak a language I have spent the least time studying? Maybe it’s because growing up in the US you hear so much Spanish that you think it might just sink in. (and wouldn’t it be awesome if it did!) My friend’s grandmother decided I must speak it fluently because I once responded when she said something within my Spanish 1 level of understanding and thereafter only spoke to me only in Spanish. But still, frustratingly, I do not.
And it annoys me that only one fully functioning language resides in my brain space. There are bits and pieces of three other languages floating about in there, and the way my brain sees it, one foreign language is as good as the next, so when I find myself digging around trying to have an actual conversation what comes out is a fantastically useless mixture of all three (with maybe some English thrown in as well). Since very few people speak Frenspanichishman, my personal blend of French, Spanish and German, that doesn’t do me much good.
Still I find that if you really want to communicate, and you and the person you are trying to talk to are really dedicated you can totally have a conversation, maybe not fleshing out the intricacies of socialized health care, but a little who are you, where are you from, what do we now have in common discussion – totally. I found this out at dinner one night in San Carlos.
My father and step-mother have been traveling to San Carlos and Magdalena Bay to see gray whales during their northern migration for the last sixteen years, and this year I got to tag along. Each year they book Enrique Soto, who has long since become a friend, to take them out into the bay.
Enrique Soto
Enrique has been taking tourists adventurous enough to come to San Carlos (which is definitely off the beaten path) on whale watching trips for the last twenty years. He has a truly unique relationship with these gigantic creatures. They flock to him. And if you’re lucky enough to be on his boat, they flock to you. I got to pet gray whales like they were friendly neighborhood poodles. It was unreal. But more on that soon.
The last night of our stay in San Carlos, Enrique invited us over his house for dinner. His beautiful wife Veronica made this shrimp soup (below) which hardly illustrates it’s awesomeness.
Then we had homemade tamales. Oh yummy yum yum. It was a fantastic meal.
Enrique and his sons all speak English but Veronica doesn’t. She speaks about as much English as I speak Spanish. Still we managed to have a conversation, mostly around photographs. I told her I live in San Francisco and showed her some photos on my phone. She ran to the other room and came back with a box of photos of their trip to SF. She started pulling out family photos, photos of herself as a girl, photos of her sons, of her parents… I showed her pictures of my cat, my mother, me dying my hair purple, everything I had on my phone. And somehow we managed to come up with the words for what we wanted to say with these pictures. When my parents and I left at the end of the night I gave Veronica a hug and told her how much I loved “talking” with her. She told me something (that I think meant the samein spanish of course) and her sons, laughing at our goofy exchange said the last time they had English speaking guests over Veronica had waved them a fond farewell and said “Mouse to meet you!” Ok so I’m guessing she must have said “mice” to meet you, which is only one letter off “nice” to meet you, so it’s not really that bad. But we all found it completely hysterical and teetered back to our hotel giggling the whole way.
I loved this trip to Mexico. It was totally different to my first experience there and I can’t wait to get my photos up and share more. Thanks so much to my parents and the Soto’s, truly “mouse to meet you!”
P.S. Oh! and I have decided to really try to learn to speak Spanish. Podcasts have been downloaded and the roommates will have to get used to the vocab post-its I’m sticking all over the house. I have been dreaming of going to Argentina for about a year now and when I get there I’m going to be speaking Spanish (even if it’s accompanied by wild hand gestures and bits of French and English). So there brain!
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