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Published: October 31st 2008
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Tim version:
* Learnt Spanish for a week with an awesome local family.
* Got to see the local islands, and taste a whole lot of Nicaraguan Cuisine.
Not very long for a full week of stuff version:
A late get up from La Libertad Hostel and I mozied down to my Spanish school for the week, Nicaragua Mia! Id signed up for 28 hours of lessons, home stay with a local family, AND all activites. Usually Id go the bare essential lessons but I wanted to try the works this time...
When down there they took me to my local family and the place was pretty cool! By our standards still way into the poverty zone but by Nicaraguan standards this place was wicked. Nothing grungy or crappy about the place, its a beautiful home. Its just the little things like nearly everyone sleeping in one room and having toilets and showers in the same room behind shower curtains... privacy? Nope! Except for me... you feel pretty bad paying what isnt a lot of money and the room I got had a bed with a mosquito net and my own toilet and shower, plus a small
desk to study on. Anyway I got there, dumped my gear, had time for a quick lunch, then hadda go back for my 1pm lesson. 4 hours a day lessons, mostly in the morning. I was running real late so my Nica Father for the week Freddy (its easier just to refer to them like family for the story... anyway they were for the week) gave me a ride on his motorbike down there, very handy!!
Now Im not gonna explain every day because I did the same thing each day, so just a little info for my memory and whoever reads this if they care... My Profesora was Martha, 21 from Masaya. The teachers know little to no English, so the start of the lessons is always fun although its amazing how much you learn from that. You´re leaning the same way a child learns English or whatever their native tongue is, and its a cool way to learn. At my home for the week I also spoke almost all Spanish, so it really gives you a good kickstart. Martha had a tonne of patience for me and managed to understand my really broken purely present tense Spanish
Horse and cart
Still tonnes of them rockin around, good to see they haven´t been replaced yet! pretty bloody well!! The grammar lessons were a bitch and you really need an English book for them but she had one so that was cool. Weekend lessons were much better because it was 4 hours of useful study but for some reason during the week they love to make you play games with the other students. This would work except the skill levels are so varied! The games are like saying "everyone with brown hair must swap chairs" or something, and the last person to get a chair is out... kids games yeh? Could be kinda fun except when we started some people were up to complicated sentences and I didnt know the word for hair or the word for brown... or the word for chair heh. So for me, not such a fun game!! By the end of the week I knew the stuff but then there was new people struggling like I did at the start of the week! By the end though I had enough to help me get around the country and thats really what I wanted... next I just need to study the grammar heaaaaps more coz its freakin difficult to conjugate verbs and
Rich Island house
You cant see it from the photo but this place was seriously grand work out how something would be said in a spanish sentence structure wise.
A little about the family I stayed with. The Father, Freddy, fought in the Nicaraguan conflict not so long ago. An incredible guy, he was from what I gathered from his Spanish, around second in command of a very large group of people, and part of the anti aircraft division. He is a qualified electrician and electrical engineer. Their son, Freddy, is who I generally ate with and mucked around with trying to speak Spanish, and he was about 14. The rest of the family, the mother and 3 daughters, I generally just saw and talked to around meal time but they were really cool too. The food the mother cooked, man, it was so good!!! I barely ate the same thing twice and it was all seriously tasty. I am officially in love with a dish called Gallo Pinto, one of their cheap staples, so its a handy one to love! I spent most days half in the school and half studying so didn´t get to talk to them much and was frustrated when I did as I couldnt say what I wanted to say,
whcih drove me to study more. Hopefully in the future I can return with much better Spanish and pay them a real visit and be much more sociable with them!
Activity wise for the week I got to do a tour of Granada heh which it turned out I was the only one on and I´d seen it all anyway. I also went on an Island tour and had a very unsuccessful dance class of some sort. The island tour is awesome but its crazy how much money has been spent on places on those islands. Its a good place to see the who´s who of Nicaragua as they all have rich holiday houses on the islands. They´re so close together they mostly have power lines and telephone lines going to them so they´re not isolated or anything, but they´re very beautiful. From $25,000 up you too could own one! There is even a very small island where my monkey shots come from where half a dozen monkeys live, and nothing else! They cant get off the tiny island, and a very on a neighbouring island feeds them and looks after them. Why are they stuck on the island?
Guerilla Radio
Their radio broadcasting room. Is this kinda cruel to animals? Well, who knows. The RSPCA doesnt exactly exist in Nicaragua, or really any of Central America for that matter! Cruelty to animals is more of a sport and way of life than something bad... I know that sounds harsh, but really, its kinda true!
No real killer stories other than that for my week of learning Spanish as I had my head in the books most of the time, but I seriously enjoyed it and would recommend to anyone wanting to learn a language to learn it in a country that speaks it and to stay with a family that speaks it! The amount of people I spoke to that did years and years of Spanish at home and found they knew fuck all when they reached over here is incredible. Couple that with the speed you learn it with over here and if its an option that is available for you then its definitely worth taking!
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