Immerse or drown

Since a few of my friends are planning to retire soon to Latin America, I thought I’d write a few comments on what to expect and what I’ve learned about Spanish immersion programs.  What’s good and what’s not so good:

First, it’s going to be very hard to survive anywhere in Latin America without at least some basic Spanish. 
Guanajuato is a university town that has an exchange program with Ashland.  There are about 20,000 students here and all of them study English.  Having said that, you’ll almost never meet anyone who speaks English, and especially not in the places you could most use the help: stores, restaurants, pharmacies, etc.  Even more importantly, without a year or so of university-equivalent Spanish, it’s going to be that much harder to get started.  At my school, there have been to a number of students with no Spanish at all who take two or three weeks of classes then take off for several months or a year of travel in Latin America.

Good luck.

There are some negatives about the program that I’m in, common, I think to any program like this, and all of them structural.  You can start on any Monday and take as many or as few classes as you want, including private classes.  You can stay for only one week or as long as you want.  This is a great convenience, but it also makes good scheduling almost impossible for individual students.  The mix of students changes dramatically every week, and trying to get every student in the classes they want at the level they need is nearly impossible.  I didn’t want to take any grammar classes since I need practice in listening comprehension and speaking.  I can and do study grammar on my own, but much of it is more or less absorbed through the skin.  Still, most weeks I’ve had two of four classes in grammar, and again because students come and go, there’s no coherence in the classes.  One week we’ll study one topic, the next week another.  It’s only next week, my last of five, that I actually have the right mix of classes that I’ve wanted all along.

That being said, the staff is without exception excellent.  At least they understand the grammar they are teaching very well, and since all classes are conducted entirely in Spanish, it’s good practice just to be listening to the target language, even if I do feel that other classes would be more valuable.  Generally, I think I’ve made huge progress in listening comprehension and speaking, good progress in building vocabulary, and, ironically, probably little or no progress in grammar.  I still more or less guess when to use the preterit or imperfect past tenses, two tenses in Spanish when only one will do in English.  Ditto between the two forms of the very “to be,” where English gets by just fine thank you very much with one.  Don’t even ask me about the subjunctive, which is evil and put there only to discourage gringos from staying for more than about two weeks.

On the other hand, living in Mexico, you quickly have to learn all the other tenses to speak about the past, present and future, and then  the compound tenses, such as “if I had known blah blah blah, I would have blah, blah, blah.”  Or the almost impossible, “If I [future] blah, blah, blah, I will have blah, blah, blah.”  These don’t come readily when you need them, but in class where they are patient and wait for you to put a sentence together, you can puzzle it out.

Here, immersion means immersion.  I pass four hours a day in class entirely in Spanish, and during breaks the intermediate students like me try to stay in Spanish as well.  Living in a Spanish-speaking household, I start and end my day in Spanish.   There’s very little homework since most students are here both to study and to go out drinking, but I can spend as much time as I want studying on my own.  And I’ve found one of the best tools to be television.  I can almost completely understand some programs, such as those on NatGeo.  Last night I watched a program on modern ice breakers and had no problem understanding almost all of it.  Wow, who knew about ice breakers?  The narrators speak more slowly than normal and they’re trained to enunciate very clearly.  If only everyone would speak that way I’d be feeling pretty, pretty good (as Larry David says).

What I call street Spanish is a different story.  Outside of the classroom, people speak very fast, and in Mexico they use so many idiomatic expressions that even if you can distinguish individual words, you still won’t understand much of what they say.  As a simple example, “Es pan comida,” translates as “it’s eaten bread,” but idiomatically it means, “It’s easy.”  That one’s kind of obvious, which is the reason I understand it.  There are about a thousand more that are used every day that simply don’t translate at all.  I have a list of a few hundred in Spanish/English and English/Spanish, but they’re a lot harder to learn than simple vocabulary.

So in the end, there’s a lot of classroom and more formal Spanish I can understand quite well, but a lot more everyday Spanish that might as well be Greek. One guidebook I have suggests the only way you’ll ever learn real Spanish is to get a Mexican girlfriend or boyfriend.  That not being an option for me, watching soap operas or movies at least helps me to process what I hear much faster than I would otherwise.  Unfortunately, most movies and all soap operas suck, so I can only stay with it for an hour or so.   

Also:  Mexican Spanish is what we learn in school and I’m guessing what is taught in programs such as Rosetta Stone, but the language varies a great deal from region to region, even in the same country.  Columbian Spanish, for example, just drops many syllables, and you have to have a pretty good ear to catch what’s being said.   Still, with a little practice you can pick it up, and if you can say it in Mexican Spanish, they can understand you in any region.

Finally, this is a very inexpensive way to travel and study.  My classes are about $120 a week, and my homestay is $27 a day including meals, although I still eat many of my meals in town.  If I do it again, I might take a room in a hostel just for the little bit of added privacy.  I’m not sure I gain much from the simple conversations I have in the home, but most if not all schools can place you in a hostel of some kind for a comparable price.  The school I’m attending has a very nice hostel with private rooms and baths, and I’d be very happy to stay there.  It’s also close to El Centro, as opposed to the long walk downtown from where I live and the punishing walk back up the hill.  Since I’ve been fairly sick with a bad cold almost the whole time I’ve been here, I always take a cab back.  There’s also a bus which only costs five pesos, about four cents, but I haven’t quite had the nerve to try it yet.  I worry that if I get on the wrong bus—easy to do—I might have a hard time finding my way back, and the cab ride is only about $2.50.

So, bottomlinewise, this is a great way to travel and a real jump start for anyone wanting to improve language skills rapidly.  If I could stay a year, I think I’d be approaching a level of proficiency if not fluency, but that’s way beyond my budget and way more time than I’d choose to stay away from Mary and home.  Too bad, because this is a great adventure and a wonderful experience.  If I were planning to actually to move to Latin America, I’d definitely start it out this way.  At the end of five weeks, you’ll be a lot more competent in the language and definitely know if this is a place you actually want to live. 

........ 

Today is the last day of Festival Cervantino, and I’ll be glad when everybody goes home.  I’ve been to several excellent concerts, all but one free, but last night was the traditional every-kid-from-Mexico-City-comes-to-Guanajuato-with-a-sleeping-bag-and-a-lot-of tequila end of the festival, and the streets were una locura.  I went downtown to eat and quickly turned back to a Swedish restaurant that serves good meatballs and is almost always empty.  It’s a refuge when I don’t want to be in Mexico anymore, which happens from time to time. 

Then I went home and watched some soap operas.  

Mary arrived Monday night ten days ago, and I happily met her at the airport with a very bad cold which had been coming on over the weekend.  Despite the cold, we got out in the city a little on Tuesday and had a good time exploring the many little streets and shops, but by that night I was really sick and worrying about things like pneumonia. At the least, I was worried I’d be sick the whole time she was here and pretty much ruin her visit.

Instead, of course, she got sick too, so we spent our ten days together coughing and sneezing and hocking up phlegm.  Not that it slowed us down much.  Our only real concession is that we always took a cab  back up to the house and I never had a chance to watch her nearly die climbing the hill.

Still, we had a great time together even if we were only running at about fifty percent. 

While I was in class, Mary went out exploring on her own and met me after school.   We tried a number of restaurants, from fairly expensive to the most humble.  Generally, humble was better.  We also caught some great concerts, including a free one in a plaza by an incredibly hot traditional/modern group called Sol del Monton.  I’ve got the DVD. 

Yesterday was her last full day, so I skipped school and we spent our time downtown checking off a few of the must-see locations here in Guanajuato.  Pipila is a statue of a hero of the Mexican war of independence against Spain, and although his most famous exploit, storming the gate of a Spanish fort in the middle of town, is probably a myth, there’s a huge statue of him on top of a hill across from our house.  The view from there is even more impressive than from my casa and it looks down on El Centro.  Then we went to the Diego Rivera museum and from there on to a historical museum, including some pre-Columbian art.  Guanajuato was founded in the mid-1500s, so there’s a lot of history to cover in a few hours.

We also went on a tour last weekend to the pyramid at Peralta, about an hour away.  It’s not Teotihuacán, but impressive enough in its own right.  After that, the tour took us to the largest tequila factory in the world.  Interesting in itself, although we had to pass on the tasting room.  We miss out on a lot not being drinkers.

Today I stayed out of school again to go with Mary to the airport.  Because of security, I couldn’t go with her even up to the ticket counter, so we said a quick goodbye, and now I’m on my own again back in our little room.  I trust her flight got out okay and she should be back in Klamath Falls at 11pm local time.  I’ll send off an email in the morning and try to call later.  [She made it without incident.]

There’s still a week to go of the festival, but like the locals, I’m rather looking forward to its end.  It’s not hard to imagine how crazy it gets downtown with tens of thousands of visitors, a fair number of them students from Mexico City who come up to drink and raise hell, and despite all the great, often free events, it will be nice to have our quiet little city back again.  I hope to spend the next ten days really concentrating on my classes and studying in my spare time, though I’ll also certainly try to take in a few more events and do a little more exploring. 

Time has passed quickly, and although I’ve sometimes missed home or grown tired of living in Spanish nearly twenty-four hours a day, I’m already feeling a little sad about leaving.  I met a man at a little coffee house close to school, and he was talking obviously native Spanish to his wife.  And then he turned to me and he chatted awhile in his perfect English.  Turns out he’s a Puerto Rican now living in Denver, but he comes here every year for the festival. 

“It’s kind of addicting,” he said.

                                                        Picture of the Week

                                                      Harley riders are the same all over the world

If you had told me a year ago. . . .

that I would be sitting in an outdoor amphitheatre in Guanajuato, Mexico with an American classmate and two of my Mexican teachers listening to an absolutely first-rate jazz big-band from Scandanavia, I would have said,

“Really?  How cool is that?”

But that’s where I was Wednesday night for the opening ceremony of Festival Cervantino, a series of concerts, plays, and dance performances, plus street performers ranging from Mariachi to jugglers, that officially runs the last two weeks of October. 

Most of these could be considered world-class presentations:  Examples include the Saint Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, The Oslo String Orchestra, and the Chinese National Opera of Peking.  The Mexican National Opera is performing Il Postino, based on the wonderful Italian movie of the same name and written by the Mexican composer Daniel Catan.  There are a total of five operas, twenty-something classical concerts ranging from full symphonies to string quartets, and another twenty or so pop and jazz concerts.

Who knew there was a Norwegian blues band with an international reputation?  I’m looking forward to hearing an Afro-Cuban jazz band that’s actually from Cuba, and a variety of Afro-pop and regional musics from Latin America.  Many events are performed at the same time at various venues around the city, so there’s no way to see it all, but navigating the program is half the fun.

Festival Cervantino is the largest arts festival in Mexico, and I can’t think of anything of its kind in the United States.  Maybe New York City on a slow day, but otherwise. . . .

Guanajuato is designated a “Patrimonio Cutural de la Humanidad” by the United Nations because of its plethora of well-preserved and restored colonial cathedrals and museums, including, for example, the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo museum in the restored house where Rivera grew up.  (Been there.)  Magnificent paintings by both, but unfortuneately, there are no Rivera murals in Guanajuato.

So anyway, here I am sitting in the amphitheater back in the free seats, surrounded by mostly young Mexicans and listenting to one of the best jazz concerts I’ve attended.  I’d compare the band to Wynton Marsallis’ Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.  The music is complex, technically about impossible to play, and a challenge to listen to.  Just my stuff. About a third of the crowd back in the free seats left after three or four numbers, but their seats were quickly taken by people who were waiting outside. 

The whole thing was magical.  How could a thing like this happen in Mexico, a country whose reputation now is almost entirely one of violence and terrorism, and how is it I happen to be here?  Life constantly throws suprises at us, and sometimes they can turn out to be among the best moments of our lives.

After the concert, there immediately began a long fireworks display, accompanied by very loud recordings of stirring classical music:  Handel, of course, and I think Brahms and Beethoven.  The whole thing was so spectacular and emotionally stirring it made me cry.  But then, cat food commercials sometimes make me cry. 

Afterwards, my classmate Eric and I went off on our own, and Eric, being a true adventurer, led me to another one of those crowded bars and restaurants I never would have gone into on my own, where he threw back shots of tequila and I, of course, had my usual Diet Coke.  We ate about a ton of tacos and the whole thing cost about four dollars.  I’ve found and been told by other students that the quality of food is usually inversely proportional to the cost.  Among the best are the food stalls in the street, and I’m still happy to report that I’ve suffered no ill effects to my digestive system.  I have a little cold, though. 

Did I remember my camera for any of this?  No.

If there’s a downside here it’s that my days have been very long and tiring between five hours of Spanish classes a day, trying to make it back up to my house for lunch with my Mexican family (the big meal of the day), homework (not much), and then back out again to explore and take in the various events.

Mary arrives Monday for ten days, and I’ll probably skip a lot of classes so we can get out more on our own and concentrate on being tourists.  I’ve held back on visiting many of the places I want to see until she gets here.

Enough for now.  More later. 

Saludos.