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Published: October 12th 2008
Oct 12, 2008
7:45 am Sunday
Wow a lot has been going on since I wrote last weekend.
First of all, last weekend I managed to leave my USB 1G memory stick in the computer at the internet place… I didn’t realize this until I’d gotten home, of course. I caught the last bus into Esteli, ended up on the Sandino urbano that takes the super long way around, and was worried that I’d miss the last bus out of Esteli… So I asked the cobrador, or the guy who takes your money on the bus, and he was super helpful in telling me where to catch the last urbano out of Esteli so that I could catch the last bus back to my community, and in telling me that I probably wouldn’t find my USB but that he wished me the luck of the gods.
Naturally, once I got to the internet place, the girl had no idea what I was talking about. I didn’t really expect to recover it, but I had to try.
Caught the 2nd to last urbano out of downtown and was freaking out because there was no one waiting at the
the view from my bedroom door
kitchen is to the left, lavandero to the right, and bano down the hillhospital bus stop except one guy… he was a well dressed middle aged man, so I went to ask him if a bus was coming or if I’d missed the last one… and of course that led into a long conversation….
We just had our midterm language interviews the day before yesterday. I jumped up three levels and am changing classes because, although I love Iowa and VTech, Spanish class kills me because, para mi, it’s so damn slow and boring.
That said, though, I still have a hard time understanding Spanish spoken by people outside of my family… like the cobrador or the gentleman at the bus stop or Bulldog… but I try and ask questions and listen to what they’re saying and understand, but their accents are all different, they’re using vocab that takes all of my skills using context clues to figure out what the unknown vocab might mean, and they’re going at a speed beyond most of my comprehension… which makes conversation difficult! I tend to give the Chinese non-committal grunt and head nod often… one of the most useful things I got from China.
I am getting better at understanding Bulldog, but
that’s probably because he eats lunch with us most days and he has a very… expressive face, which helps with the context clues. He still speaks a million miles a minute and he uses the voseo with me, and, though that is a compliment of sorts and is great for my espanol, it makes understanding everything he’s saying that much more difficult!
So the point is that Spanish is by far the hardest thing about life in Nicaragua… I am an intelligent person and have things to say pero no tengo bastante palabras en este idioma para expresar mis pensamientos o sentimientos or to comment on life or to ask all the questions I want to or to grasp the whole meaning of mi madre’s lectures sobre la vida.
She is a very opinionated woman with lots of things she wants to impart upon me, and I can understand a great deal of what she says, but I can’t respond! Not with anything that sounds semi intelligent. I mean she talks to me about the meaning of life, about her very progressive values concerning education and waiting for marriage, about death, about Nicaraguan men, about her concerns about
her family - everything under the sun. I think it’s as much of a release for her as it is interesting for me because I am a gringa, am from outside with different ideas, I am a part of the family so I can understand the context but am outside enough that I’m not directly involved, and she knows I can understand most of what she says … but it’s probably a release for her that I can’t respond! I am like her great living diary.
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