My parents are polyglots.
They are fluent in English and Tagalog and understand some Spanish
because universities in the Philippines required it when they were in
college. When I studied a foreign
language in high school, I chose French because the last thing I wanted was for
my parents to know what I was saying.
When I met Michael, he convinced me it was wise to learn Spanish,
which I agreed would come in handy in the construction business. I self-studied a little bit but, with no
outlet for conversation, it proved fruitless.
Fast forward 10 years and as professionals, we have some money to get
solid instruction from a native speaker.
We took lessons via Skype with a Colombian woman, Patricia Rodriguez,
living in Texas. Our Spanish improved
immensely and soon we were able to have conversations in front of the kids
without their knowing what we were saying.
Ah ... the circle of life.
While in Colombia, we took Spanish lessons in Medellín and in
Bogotá. I chose the schools based on
reviews, price and ... sad to admit ... their online presence.
Toucan Spanish in Medellín would post pictures multiple times a
week about what their students were doing.
What convinced me to go with them was that they seemed organized enough
to keep on posting in such a consistent manner.
They also responded so quickly to my email inquiries and gave me reminders we got closer to our start date that Michael & I had to take an
online test and schedule an interview with the director to test our
conversational skills. I was the only
one that took the interview and was promptly demoted from my online test grade
to a lower ranking. I wasn't offended
because I guessed a lot towards the end on the multiple-choice test.
The First Morning
Despite our long airplane journeys to Colombia, I woke up super
early at 6am on our first morning in Medellín.
One might say it was because I was eager to get coffee and buy a
notebook before class started at 9am, but this is only part of the truth. I was eager to see if I had internet
connection in our room so I could download the latest episode of The Walking
Dead! In case you're waiting with baited
breath, I did have good wifi and I did enjoy the penultimate episode! After the riveting zombie fiction, Michael
and I were ready to get coffee, school supplies, and TOOTHPASTE!
The weather outside was as wonderful in the morning as it had been
the previous night. Medellín has been
well named The City of Eternal Spring.
The humidity was just enough to make my hair look fabulous and the crisp
temperatures kept me cool enough not to sweat.
In other words, I felt and looked fabulous!!
There is only one thing open earlier than 8am in Colombia and that
is the hair salons where women can get their hair done so cheaply they go there
before work every morning. The next
thing that opens are coffee shops chains at 8am - too late in my opinion. I'm so used to Starbucks opening at 6am that I was shocked when we walked up to the Juan Valdez at 7:55,
the entrance roll-up door was still partially hanging down an few inches
from the ceiling.
We both enjoyed our cafe con leche while we admired the view of
Parque Lleras and the few restaurant workers starting their sweeping of the
sidewalks. We later did not enjoy the
leche part of our coffee because we farted up a storm in class. That was the last time in a long while that I
had milk with my coffee. From that point
on, I kept having "cafe negro" or "cafe tinto." Both options will get you coffee without the
diuretic milk.
At 8:55am, we arrived at Toucan Spanish and stood around like
idiots while students raced to their classrooms. It is common for foreigners to take multiple
weeks of classes and we were standing in a tornado of fellow Latinophiles. The receptionist is a young Colombian who was born and raised in
the good ole State of Tennessee, so she picked up on our doe-eyed confusion and
let us know which classrooms we needed to report to. Michael headed down the hall in the opposite
direction and I searched for my classroom numbered 2.
I had 3 classmates who had been there the week prior, but I was
able to catch up on the past tenses they were working on because our old
teacher Patricia had taught me a little on the subject. Our teacher said his name was John and
thought that maybe he was Americanizing the name "Juan." I later asked him what if his name was
really John and not Juan and he confirmed that yes it was as he claimed the
first time. Through our travels we would
meet a lot of people whose names were not the Hispanic pronunciations but were
full-on Anglo Saxon versions of John, Johanna, Jefferson, and George!
At break time, everyone either went outside the building to smoke
or they convened at the break room where extra coffee and hot water were
available. Michael was nowhere in sight
so I took my cup of coffee and sat in their open-air patio. In my younger years, I would have been
terrified to sit alone while people in the other room talked amongst one
another, but I quite enjoyed sitting there observing the construction of the
metal trellis, the curtain covering the maid's cleaning area, the sounds of
traffic and birds chirping, the thick coat of white paint slathered on the CMU,
and the vibrantly green hue of the fake grass floor covering. I was loving being in Medellín! To be in a new world without the insecurities
of youth allowed me to absorb what the city and its people had to offer.
After a while I decided to walk around and at least locate where
Michael's room was. I found him talking
to a classmate flustered at the complexity of the subjunctive past tense. While I had had a great first session
floundering but staying afloat in the end, Michael had just outright
drowned. He was ready to quit the entire
school he was so frustrated. After my rave
reviews, he decided he was going to jump ship and latch onto my class the
following day.
It may not have been the
instructors that stopped Michael's progress; he has been at this point
before. When we stopped with Patricia,
it was when he was learning subjunctive.
It was as if his brain and enthusiasm shut down and now that he was
faced with this same particular past tense, he was not having it. If I remember correctly, the subjunctive was
when he stopped doing so well in high school too.
Michael did well in my
class, but we didn't have enough time to progress to the ever-looming
subjunctive. I would later request at
our next Spanish school that we focus on this and the imperative tense.
The wonderful thing about the Toucan Spanish school is that they
set up so many activities outside the classroom.
The very first day, we had the opportunity to attend a welcome lunch
featuring a typical Colombian meal for $4 and a salsa lesson at a nearby dance
studio for free! Of course I signed us
up for both along with an exotic fruit taste test on another day. Since we were attending the school during so
many holidays (Day of St. Joseph, Holy Thursday and Holy Friday), they didn't
have as many activities as they usually have.
A normal week would include a tour of the downtown "El
Centro," a tour of the famed graffiti murals around town, a trip to a
popular salsa club, and soccer games, the last of which was offered but we
declined.
First Colombian Meal in Colombia
Michael and I had tried Colombian food when we were in Tampa and
it was very underwhelming. Only the soup
"ajiaco" that our friend Diana had made was delicious. Other items such as arepa (a bland, fat round
disc of bread in need of salt), bistec caballo (well-done skirt steak with a
fried egg on top), and bandeja paisa (a sampling of well-done meats in the form
of sausages, ground crumbles, and a slab, accompanied by rice, the infamous
arepa, a slice of avocado, plantains and a fried egg), were all so dry at all
the different restaurants we tried these items.
It was not as if one restaurant was terrible at the stove/grill, but we
had hoped that maybe the lackluster taste was due to being prepared in the
States and not in the motherland.
At the welcome lunch, we had a lot of choices to make.
- Juice: limon (A Tang version of lemonade, i.e. water with a hint of lemon) vs. tamarillo (a tomato that has a surprisingly sweet flavor that this was the one delight of the meal).
- Soup: Spinach (this version tasted very much as if they had liquified spinach and added some drops of water) or lentil (the Australian next to us loved it).
- Meat: pork (just as dry as chicken breast but tougher to chew), chicken (why go bland in the land of the bland), or beef (the most edible of the three but still dry).
- Carbohydrate: rice (they actually do their rice well in that they fry it a little with garlic) or arepa (looks like a giant communion wafer but tastes like cardboard).
Looking around at our table of Australians, Americans, and British
blokes, I could sense that they were as unimpressed with their food as Michael
and I were. But looking around at the
entire restaurant, I observed that the locals thought this restaurant was
serving mana from heaven. I saw our director off in a corner by himself,
scarfing down his meal, happy as a clam.
I can't remember if we stuck around for the dessert, but it was
obviously not very good if I can't remember it.
First Salsa Lesson
We had about 30 minutes to rest at our hostel before we had to
return to the school to be escorted to the dance studio where we would take our
first lesson. The director had sternly
told us that we needed to be at the school no later than 3:30, and we, along
with our other 2 classmates, obliged.
Our friend John, a Puerto-Rican German who lived in Bogotá for two years and is now married to Diana, had warned us that Colombians are notoriously late. Michael experienced this when he had first
visited Colombia in 2013. I now
experienced it as the clock ticked past 3:45 and no one knew where the director
was. The receptionist didn't seem
worried and assured us he was on his way.
When the clock hit 3:50, the director finally emerged from a room and
looked surprised to see the four of us lounging around in the lobby. The receptionist reminded him of our lesson
and he ushered us out the building as quickly as possible. Then he proceeded to walk as fast as the Roadrunner,
turning left and right, crossing streets and dodging cars while turning around
every couple of minutes to tell us to walk faster. WTF?!?!
I thought. We could have
leisurely taken this route if we had left at the designated time. We got to the studio, sweaty and out of
breath, and we hadn't even done one step yet.
Despite the haphazard beginning, the lesson was eye-opening. I've taken lessons before but it was great to
get some comments on fine-tuning my moves.
Despite my having rhythm, I still needed to move my body much more. The teacher kept stressing movement of the
shoulders, which was an awkward feeling at first. I felt very Frankensteinian as I rolled my
shoulders along with my hips and, after about 20 minutes, I was sore in muscles
my upper and lower body had not known existed before. Michael was the only male in the room so he
got a lot of practice leading the ladies.
At the end of the hour, we had
worked out solid!
More Working Out
One might think that after all that activity on our first day in
Colombia, Michael and I would just go home and take a nap. No, we headed straight for the gym.
Our goal in going to Colombia had been to see what it would be
like to live here in the future. Since
working out is very much part of our lifestyle, we visited Bodytech, a fitness
gym that has multiple branches within Medellín and throughout Bogotá. I had heard dismal reviews as to whether or
not we would be able to get a short-term pass but we tried anyway. Even though Michael has a hard time
conjugating on paper, Spanish flows out his mouth so easily. What words he does know comes out very confidently! To our surprise, the gym granted us a 10-day
pass and at a very reasonable price of $50 for both of us! A one day pass at 24-hour Fitness in Hawaii
had cost us $15 each so we felt like winners in Colombia!
We were also pooped and decided to nap instead of return to the gym
for our first workout. We had done so
much walking and dancing that we felt we deserved a great meal. On our first night we had noticed a
beautifully lit restaurant with a bounty of outdoor seating. The menu looked appetizing for it described
different cuts of steak, stuffed fish, sushi rolls, and wine! We just had to go there.
I have been spoiled in the States.
Every restaurant will have at least a house wine of which I can get a
cup. In Colombia, some restaurants might
have wine but the smallest you can order is a half bottle if you're lucky. It's rare to be able to get a single glass of
anything. So if you want to have some
wine, you'll be lucky if the entire bottle you chose is to your liking.
Fish, shrimp and beef medallions
Where Are the Toiletries?!
After our very delicious meal of medium rare meat and fish stuffed
with shrimp, we searched the area for toiletries. Michael really needed shaving gel, after
shave balm, and Qtips. I really needed
shampoo, conditioner, soap, hair clip, and mousse. It was so late and we were so dirty that we
didn't contemplate saving money and heading to the Colombian version of
Walmart. Instead we headed straight for a
mom-and-pop, and found most of the things we needed.
Some luxuries we are used to in the States are rare in
Colombia. Even though Colombian men shave,
they do not seem to like the use of after shave balm. It would take us a few days before we found
one bottle for sale.
The same is true of hair clips (the ones with claws) and of
mousse. It made me wonder why in a
country so concerned about beauty that they wouldn't have such essential hair
products. As I spent more days observing
the people, I realized the reason - at least the reason for the women of
Medellin. Every woman has the same
hairstyle. Straight, long and shiny. I rarely saw a woman with curls or any layers
or any blow-dried bouffants. Every teen,
20-, 30, and 40-year old seemed to succumb to the trend of the Brazilian
Blowout. With this hairstyle, there's no
need for mousse or hairclips!
We won't stink and stick for at least a couple of days.
After our partial toiletry success, Michael and I returned to our
room and did the oddest thing one would do on vacation. We studied our Spanish! Michael had already decided he would crash my
class so he studied what he could of my worksheets. Then at 9pm, we konked out just as we do back
at home. We were really living in Colombia now.
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