Things are going pretty well for me. I started Spanish classes on Monday, Jan. 3, and I’m making progress. Nowhere near as quickly as I’d like, mind you, but progress is still good.
One thing I hadn’t thought of before this trip is that there’s a big non-pandemic difference between my current Spanish study and the last time I took intensive immersion classes in 2001. Back then, Spanish was a nice thing to know, but it wasn’t really important to my life. I was going to return to my job in Philadelphia in a few weeks. I didn’t need to know Spanish for my job, nor did I need it for my personal life. Occasionally it came in handy, but I certainly could have gotten by quite well without it.
But if I’m going to live here, it’s important that I speak the language competently, not just at the “well enough to get by” level. And I’m gradually getting better. Or, in Spanish: Poco a poco, estoy mejorando.
I’m already at the point where I can hold up my end of a conversation with someone who is patient. And in my first week of classes, we went over verb conjugations in the present, preterit, imperfect past, “futura cercano” and simple future. I’m nowhere near perfect in them, but I’m getting better. I’m a lot better with written Spanish than with spoken Spanish. (For that matter, I’m better at written English than spoken English. There’s more time to think when writing and reading than with the spoken language.)
There’s also a pandemic-related issue with my studies. I guess I assumed that once in-person Spanish classed resumed at these schools, there would be a lot of pent-up demand. Nope. I signed up with one Spanish school, but their classes in Cuenca were apparently closed, so they farmed my education out to another school. That’s fine, but it turns out that even with taking the overflow from another school, I was the only student taking morning classes this past week. Of course that’s not good for the stability of the school or the local economy. It also means I didn’t get a chance to interact with other students. And they had difficulty with scheduling for the coming week, making it so I have to switch from morning classes to afternoon. Presumably when teachers were laid off, they found other work to keep afloat and they aren’t available to return immediately.
Things are going well with the homestay. The matriarch of the family gives good advice about places to go and things to do. Yesterday (Saturday, Jan. 8), I went to the old cathedral of Cuenca, which dates to the 1500s and is now a museum. Unfortunately, in the 20th century, some people thought it would be a good idea to cover the historic wall paintings with industrial paint. There’s been a lot of work to restore it, though, and it’s well worth seeing.
I’ve also returned to running. On Friday, Jan. 7, I went back to Week 1 of the None to Run program, in which you start by running for 30 seconds, walking for 2 minutes, then repeat for a total of 20 minutes. As the weeks go by, you run more and walk less until week 10, when it’s all running. In Ohio, I got to a point where I could consistently run a 10-minute mile. But the altitude here (2,500 meters/8,400 feet) makes it a lot harder, so I started over at Week 1. I continued with Week 1 today.
