Hablo español

A full day of Spanish classes today (minus the time spent waiting for my bag to arrive at the house)! And I still love speaking Spanish - I love the way the r's roll off my tongue and the cadence of the language. However, today was all about grammar.  And I mean the crazy tenses, like imperfect subjunctive, that I haven't seen or used since Spanish 2 in 2010 at Tufts, and even my exposure was quite brief. Though I made significant improvements in speaking Spanish - getting my message across - while in Panama and family medicine clerkship in Lawrence, I paid no real attention to the grammar and complicated tenses. So, today was hard. But this knowledge is brushing off the dust and climbing out of the lower depths of my brain. It's also amazing how the more I speak, the more I recall vocabulary I had once learned, even if I hadn't heard someone use it yet this trip. 

For those of you who think my keys at home are excessive, check out what I've got here. And this is just for one house:

This casa (house) is more like fortress. I took a video of the locks for the front gate, but blogger here is not advanced enough to let me upload video. Instead, I will explain. The front gate uses the two purple keys for two different deadbolts, each requiring three turns to lock or unlock (with the deadbolt further advancing with each turn), and then a coordinated movement of an extra half turn of each to release the latch. Now I repeat this, but thrice, with the three red keys for the front door often house, then the blue key for the next door of the house. There's a key for my room, and two miscellaneous keys of unknown use at this time.  Furthermore, this fortress-esque gate-door is surround by an approximately 10 ft high wall (cement), the top of which is purposefully covered in large shards of glass. While I feel quite safe inside, I wonder what would happen if I were being chased home by a criminal or something . (Mom, please ignore this second clause). (Everyone else please admire my use of the English subjunctive in the second clause). 

After classes today, my first order of business, naturally, was to head to the open air market to check out the local fruit selection. Also, I was hungry. I made two purchases. The first was "una sandía", a large, dark green, globular fruit. Everyone was surprised when I came home, claiming how excited I was to try this "sandía" for the first time.  Well, turns out "sandía" is watermelon, not so exotic nor unfamiliar, but quite delicious. A whole one for $3.50! I also bought 4 "granadillas" for $1. Wordreference translates this as passion fruit, but I thought the word for that was "maracuya." I ate a ton if watermelon tonight, so I'll eat granadilla tomorrow and report back. I will also try to upload some pictures from my camera. 

Dinner tonight! My first at my home stay. It started with this soup below, a chicken stock-like base, with quinoa and veggies, and you can see we put popcorn on top! Followed by rice, chicken, and veggies. Delicious! 

 

Also, forget what I said yesterday about my homestay not feeling like a family. At dinner was Rosita (my home stay mother, who instructs us to address her as Rosita, not Señora, and in the tù (casual) verb forms), myself, and 3 other students. We spoke in Spanish the whole time, laughed, and had a wonderful time. 

¡Buenas noches!