Spanish Lessons, Day One: Wait, Where´s the Airplane?

Greetings from Cuenca, which is, according to some rinky-dink ABC offshoot´s extrapolation of an International Living survey, ¨the best place to retire that you´ve never heard of.¨ Possessing, as it does, a ¨nice hospital¨ and also ¨some culture¨. Given that Cuenca has 52 separate museums and its own orchestra, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well as a hotbed for most artistic endeavors in South America, that´s kind of like saying ¨politics are tangentially involved¨when speaking of DC.

Ah well. Cuenca is also a most excellent place to learn Spanish, and I´m diving in deep with that this week. It was so nice to return to the Abraham Lincoln Center, where I´ve been studying for three consecutive summers now: got a lot of air-kissing practice from the enthusiastic guards and a more reserved but no less genuine welcoming handshake from my skilled, dignified, and exceedingly long-suffering maestro, Raul.

But that was just the morning. In an attempt to shake myself out of my comfort zone and mix it up a bit with other travelers, I´m taking afternoon classes at a school that works exclusively with gringos (Abraham Lincoln is primarily a school of English for Ecuadorian youth). So far, pretty good: my teacher, Marta, is quick and responsive, and we made some decent inroads into the dreaded subjunctive.

With, alas, one fairly significant detour. When I learned to speak English, I really never paid any attention to organizational concepts or rules of grammar: words were just the sea that I swam in, and it was always quite easy to master the strokes. That doesn´t work so well with Spanish, unfortunately, especially when your new teacher assumes you´re entering the work with a good working use of the different terms for verb tenses. I have four hours a day with Marta, and at least one of them yesterday was spent with her fruitlessly asking me for examples of various tenses I'd already used in conversation but had no idea what to call: I simply didn't have the pegs on which to hang any of those articles of clothing.

It reminded me of nothing so much as that hideous Open Court unit on Patriotism we dutifully walked our kindergarteners through each year. The most hair-pulling part of that was always the Reading Comprehension exercises we had to do with the lyrics of "America, the Beautiful", which is a fairly non-literal little ditty even if you're not just a couple short years out of diapers. Inevitably, several times, children would listen politely to our explanation that Katherine Lee Bates wrote the song because she very much liked mountains and fields and fruitful American agriculture, and then ask us, "But where's the airplane?" They were okay with the mountains being the color of Barney, and they accepted the "fruited" as a given, but they just couldn't handle the non-flying of the "plain".

Making more progress today, thankfully. Fingers crossed!