Rent-A-Lap

In this country with plenty of tropical fruits, I haven't eaten many so far on this trip. So the other day I went to the new sit-down-with-waiters-cafe at the U and ordered a fruit salad - Ensalada de fruta.

The cafe is in the same building as the internet cafe and other multimedia fun stuff to do. While I was waiting for my fruit salad I looked up to see this sign:



The next message that flashed across made it clear that there was a new service to rent laptops from the internet cafe, and not that you'd be able to have your way with a human lap for a few hours. Whew!

So then I got my fruit salad. It consisted mostly of apples, strawberries, cantaloupe and a few bits of mango.

I have an apple tree in my backyard at home...

Sigh.

Anyways, it also came with a super tasty yogurt/honey dressing. And it WAS really nice to have some fruit. And I WAS really proud that I did the whole thing by myself, from ordering to paying the check. Which was honestly all of 3 or 4 sentences, but hey I got it!

The next day I bought myself a highlighter marker from the bookstore. Also by myself. And this was even harder, because I didn't know the word for highlighter, so I had to try and explain it.

First of all I was just looking at all the pens in the cases, so he probably knew I was looking for some kind of pen, and when he asked if he could help me I said "no se la palabra en espanol pero es un marquiador(?) para (and then I made the gesture of using it) un parto de texto"

"Marcador?" he corrected me.

"Si" I said, repeating my highlighting gesture.

He brought me to the place where they were (the one display case I hadn't looked in yet) and took one out and showed how it worked and I said "Eso!" and then "Cuanto cuesta?" (That! How much?).

"En este color?" I don't know if the other colors were different prices, but the yellow one was something like $1.50. I bought it. I didn't even give him a ridiculously large bill just to make sure it was enough, because I understood how many pesos he said.

I actually can't remember if I said parto or parte or parta for "part of the text". G informs me that if I said parto that means birth, whoops! Whatever I said, the clerk figured it out anyway, and the point is I was really proud of myself to go all alone to a store where they don't speak english and get something I want, even in my stumbling way. In classes our professors know English and can help out if we get really stuck, but in the stores it's different.

It sounds a little silly, but stuff like that makes me feel a little more comfortable, knowing that I could probably stumble my way through a lot of situations. Which is good. Because in the past G (or someone, or my CD lessons) would give me some little script for going through a common situation. But the problem is, if the other person "goes off the script" I would be totally, utterly lost. And why would they stay on the script in real life, especially if they didn't even know there was one? Now that I know enough Spanish to improvise a little, it's a lot less scary to think about wandering out into the world, or what might happen if I ever got lost. Not that I'd really have much desire or chance to go wandering, but now I don't have to be so terrified of it.

Grammar classes are still kicking my ass. I can't remember if I wrote earlier that I had a mini breakdown in class the first week where I ended up crying because the teacher asked me to provide an example of a sentence in the imperfect subjunctive form, and I had no idea, not one clue of how to start. Hearing that pretty much all my in-laws and some of the professors at the U don't know much about the subjunctive either made me feel less stupid. With all this grammar stuff, I never learned it in English, so learning at totally new concept in a second language is pretty hard. And I didn't need to learn much grammar in English to write and speak well, so I'm letting myself off the hook a little, which, no surprise, actually makes some of the Spanish grammar easier to learn, because I'm not stressing about it as much. And while it would be nice to speak without sounding like a 6 year old, even at my level, I CAN communicate quite a lot, which is what I'm most interested in - communicating.

And then there's stuff like "Rent-A-Lap", and I just know that everything is going to be fine.