On the Road Again

So I’m sitting on an American Airlines flight between Dallas and Miami, on the way to Nicaragua, reading Nexos, their Spanish-language in-flight magazine. After twenty minutes, my head is already spinning, as I try to recall the meaning of words I haven’t studied in 20 years. I made my way through a third of an article on Mexican basketball, and am pretty proud of myself.

It’s not like I haven’t been practicing. Since returning from Thailand two weeks ago, I’ve spent about twenty minutes a day with a Spanish CDROM from my mother in law. Even last night, fighting hard to stay asleep (why is it so hard to sleep when you know you have to get up at 4:15 am?), I found myself practicing Spanish in my head, then telling myself to shut up and go to sleep.

We’re headed to Nicaragua not just for the 95-degree weather and beans and rice, but more importantly, to immerse ourselves in studying Spanish. But the idea of four straight hours a day of Spanish class—one on one with a tutor—has me a little nervous. First of all, I haven’t been in real school in twenty years (I went back and got a fine arts degree 8 years ago…). I also haven’t studied Spanish in twenty years, since I took a year in high school and two in college. And, honestly, at 38, I’m finding that my mental cognition is not quite what it used to be.

Two years ago, Shannon and I spent nine days in Zihuatanejo, Mexico with her family, and a close friend, Melissa. I’d been in Mexico the previous couple of winters for a week of sunshine, but had a hard time getting out more than an hola here and there. But in Zihua, the minute we arrived at our lodging, I started talking with the clerk in Spanish, asking if he could give us a quieter room. For some reason, the Spanish just flowed out of me (in a halting, pathetic sort of way), and I took every opportunity I could to speak Spanish. In fact, one day, exchanging money at the bank with my friend Melissa, the teller helping me told me that my accent was much better than Melissa’s. This managed to piss off Melissa to no end, considering that’s she’s fluent in Spanish, and has lived in Central America for years at a time. I, on the other hand, walked out of the bank glowing.

Encouragement from bank tellers aside, I’m far from fluent. And what’s more, my wife eats languages for lunch, and has a brain like a magnet. Every country we visit, she picks up on far more words than I—even surprising our Slovak hosts once by pulling a complete sentence out of nowhere: Dyacuyem za shetko (Thank you for everything). She dreams in Latin names for plants. She aces her nursing school tests using words like hydrochlorothiozide, hydrogen ion gradient, and gastrocnemius. She learned rudimentary Spanish on the job at Waremart selling video rentals to Mexican farm workers. And now I have to go up against her, head to head in one-on-one Spanish study in Nicaragua.

Maybe a little friendly competition will do me good.

***

In some ways, this is a different sort of adventure than we’ve undertaken before. We’re viewing Nicaragua more as a place to live for two months, rather than just a place to visit and explore. Exploring will happen, to be sure, but our two primary goals are: Spanish, and writing.

This past summer, I re-read a book by my friend Rolf Potts called Vagabonding, something of a bible on the art of long-term world travel. He spoke of his experience of living in Laos long term, in order to write a book. This got me to thinking about where in the world we could live on, say, $12,000 a year. A person could save up that much, and then go take a year off, having time to be the person they didn’t have time to be in their normal workaday lives.

Our criteria included: sunshine, affordability, and the ability to get along without having to learn an entirely new, entirely foreign language. This last criterion ruled out SE Asia. And then we landed on the idea of Central or South America. We thought: why not study Spanish? We’ve always wanted to. We’ve never had an assignment or vacation that took us anywhere Spanish-speaking other than a few days in Spain and a few vacations in Mexico. We ruled out Mexico (pricey, and too many run-ins with Montezuma’s Revenge), Argentina (too much accent), and Costa Rica (too touristy). After reading further, we landed on Nicaragua: just as beautiful as CR, just as safe (according to the UN), but far cheaper.

And that landed us on this American Airlines flight between Dallas and Miami. Away from home and nursing school (Shannon took her NCLEX test yesterday, and we found out today that she passed) and work (although I always bring my work with me, in the form of a camera), we’re looking forward to learning the language, having time to think and write, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and seeing what memories we make to take home with us.

Hasta luego, amigos!