Yo Hablo Español, Again.

After our 4 weeks of intensive spanish classes at Escuela Delengua in Granada, Spain I felt confident that I had learned enough spanish to have a basic conversation (mainly about food…) and more importantly, I could understand people most of the time. But, the biggest mistake I made over the next couple of months was that I rarely practiced since I had Ricardo to lean on. Walking the Camino de Santiago should have been my prime time to practice, but I never felt confident enough to try. Another month passed as we traveled through London, Taiwan and Japan where I never looked at a single flashcard on my Tinycards app (a great app for flashcards!). I thought I forgot everything. So, we decided to enroll in more classes at Escuela Mexicana since we still planned on visiting more spanish speaking countries. But, to be completely honest, even on orientation day I wasn’t exactly thrilled about trying to do it again…

I was a bit disappointed in myself for not practicing what I’d learned in Spain, so why was I going to do this to myself again? Since we’d already paid for a month in our apartment (rented through the school), I figured I would go to orientation and maybe sign up for a class or two. In the end, I signed up for 3 classes and learned quite a bit. I even had an entire conversation with someone when dropping off our laundry. Sounds simple enough, but it was a huge accomplishment for me! If anything, I became more confident in speaking while we were in Guanajuato, and it reinforced what I had learned in Granada. 



We had to re-learn some words that we had learned in Spain, because they had different meanings in Mexico. For example, I laughed every time Ricardo asked where we could "take" the bus when we first got to Mexico. Feel free to look it up if you're interested ;) 



Our school organized different activities during the week, and my favorite was when we hiked Cerro de la Bufa. It was nice to get out of the city. Guanajuato has so many callejones (small winding alleys) and even more people cramming their way through the streets that sometimes I felt like I needed some space to get away from the craziness. It was a beautiful view and worth the climb!

Making mazapán during one of our cooking classes was a lot of fun, too. It is a very soft candy that crumbles a bit when you bite into it, but ours wouldn’t even hold its’ shape long enough to wrap! Ricardo did a bit of improvising and here’s a look at what we ended up with. It still tasted great, but we definitely made enough trips to Oxxo to buy our fair share! I LOVED this candy and miss it a lot. Making enchiladas was tasty too! 

 

Our Alebrijes didn't quite turn out as planned, because they're harder to make than they look. An Alebrije is an animal with some other animal characteristic, like a dog with wings. I didn't have time to finish my purple dog, but Ricardo's giraffe has some nice stripes!



After all this time in Mexico, we were ready to head to a new country. A warmer country too! Inland Mexico wasn’t as warm as we thought it’d be, so instead of traveling down through Guatemala, Nicaragua and Colombia as we had originally planned, we booked a flight to… Montevideo, Uruguay!