You know that garbly, bubbly effect that any sound takes on when you’re underwater?  You can sort of make out the highs and lows of the speaker’s voice and sometimes the louds and softs, but otherwise you have very little idea what is going on at the surface.   After a while of trying to make sense of what sounds like gibberish to your untrained ear, it becomes a kind of white noise in the background and you retreat into the quiet world of your own thoughts.  It’s a little like being in a country where it feels as if everyone around you speaks the language that you so painfully obviously do not.  Only the language at the surface here seems to be delivered in one long, loud sentence without punctuation and not enough familiarity with those in the room to ask them to translate everything they say!  The clack of consonants, accented vowels and rolled “r”‘s blend into letter mush and if you’re lucky you can decipher a word or two in a chain of sounds that must be sentences, paragraphs even and surely must mean something.

I think it would be very easy to retreat to that safe quiet of your own English speaking thoughts and so this week, here in Mexico City house-hunting, I set a challenge for myself to get out of this corporate hotel, where you don’t really ever have to communicate en espanol, at least once a day when Aaron is working.  I wandered down to the mall and figured I could probably order a coffee at Starbuck’s  (alas, this is not the land of Timmie’s on every corner, so was my only choice!  And just as pricey!).   I muster up my courage to open the door and order: “Hola, Venti Toffee Nut por favor.” (Thankfully Starbucks sizes are always in Italian, so for one word we are both speaking the same language!)  After that well rehearsed request, I’m less sure… more that I have trouble keeping up with the stream of sounds that opening my mouth to speak has invited in my direction and I know that I truly look like a deer-in-the-headlights – not sure there are even deer here…not sure what creature gets bedazzled by headlights here… maybe a gecko or a bearded dragon-in-the- headlights – anyways, I know I’m looking a bit stunned… that’s when the nice lady at Starbuck’s takes pity on me and begins to gesture….”Would you like whipped cream on top?” becomes a swirly gesture at the top of a paper cup prop she’s now using… sprinkles of something were made with an imaginary shake of an imaginary jar on imaginary whipped cream…I shook my actual head, “no”.   I think the next thing she asked was did I want cream or milk?  I said “si!” when the choice wheel stopped at “leche”.  Outside of the milk, no whipped cream and mystery sprinkles, it was a bit of a crap shoot as to what was actually going to end up in my Toffe Nut Latte as I did a lot of nodding and smiling in response to each question.  And that oh-so-charming thing that Starbuck’s does at home when they personalize your cup by asking for and then writing your name on it… well they do that here too…except our letters are pronounced just a bit differently… Cory somehow became Sorj… not sure about that one…safe to say something may have been lost in translation… but I have learned that “j”‘s are sometimes pronounced “y” and by this time I’m probably looking much more like a “sorry” than a Cory…

So thankful that everyone has been very kind!  They seem to appreciate that you give it a go.  We have to be patient with ourselves!:)