The Tower of Babel

Today we had our first day of class. It started with a placement test for the 100 or so students here this week. Not surprisingly, I'm in the class for people that don't know a word of spanish and come from a european(ish) country. (The Brazilians get put in a separate class because they learn spanish at the speed of a bullet... Portuguese and Spanish are practically the same language). In my class is a canadian, a dutchman, an englishman, a norweigan and two people from switzerland. The teacher barely speaks english, which means she gives all her instruction in spanish, but for the students in the class, that's a little difficult. Since we all know a few words in random languages, we work together to translate everything.

After 4 hours of group class the entire group of people had empanadas and my housemates and I met a bunch of other people. I actually found another norwiegan girl who's here specifically to learn tango - she's a competitive dancer back in norway. She and I already set up a date to go to special tango classes for serious dancers. That should be interesting.

After lunch, I had a 1-hour conversation with one of the teachers. That was an interesting hour because we spent no time whatsoever on grammar or any other technicalities of the language. We simply talked to each other, and I struggled with the many languages all muddled in my head, and attempted to answer her questions.

After class, Tamara and I went home to chill. Rafaela, the cook/maid at the house, cooked a giant (amazing) meal, and all the students sat down to eat. Between the 8 of us, we speak portuguese, italian, spanish, english, turkish, and german. "Pass the salt" becomes a very complicated sentence suddenly.

After dinner, Leslie, Tamara, Marc, and I went to the birthday party of a local, Pablo. (Thanks, Andrew, for introducing us). This party was especially intimidating because it was a whole bunch of argentines who were not specifically in the mind set to be patient with random foreigners. Of course Pablo, who's a spanish teacher, was awesome... he also happens to speak english and german fluently. But basically we had to be on the top of our game to talk to any of them. It was definitely a challenge - especially after only one day of class - but it was worth the shot. Maybe in a month I'll go to another party of his, and do a little better. Anyway, here's a pic from the party. From left to right, it's Leslie (Texan), Pablo (Argentine), Me, Tamara (Italian), and Marc (Austrian).