Day 12

My first real all-in-Spanish conversation on the Camino went a little something like this. (Translated)

Molly: Sir, I would like to buy your donkey.

Sir: Ha ha ha

Molly: Please?

Sir: No, my daughter likes to play with it. You will continue walking.

Molly: Too bad! Thank you.

Obviously this was a weak moment for me, at the bottom of a very large hill I was supposed to go up at the end of day 3. A backpack-hauling-size donkey was eyeing me over a fence and I just blurted out a bunch of words and they all made sense. It felt like a miracle!

I have had limited success with my Spanish after my failed donkey purchase last week. It doesn’t come out fully formed like that, just off the cuff. I have to labor for it most of the time. Although I had Spanish all through high school and then 18 credit hours of high-ish level Spanish in college (we were reading novellas at the end — granted I had the dictionary in one hand at all times), I haven’t really used my Spanish for like 15 years and it is buried very, very deep. It’s somewhere under 100 hours of song lyrics, HTML code I will never use again, and the list of TV channels and their numbers we had when I was in middle school.

Spain Spanish is also different than Latin American Spanish, of which I think was mostly the concentration when I was growing up. Some vocab is different, the accent is different, some verb forms for formal/informal are different. I’m conscience of those differences but haven’t learned them so well yet, so to avoid causing offense I do amazing verbal backflips around the things I don’t know. It’s like a game I play with my own brain but everyone else has to hear it and cringe.

This magical age of Google Translate is all new to me and I am in AWE. It takes a lot for me to look at piece of technology anymore and say WOAH but Google Translate has my WOAH. I can type stuff in, I can upload a picture of a sign, I can just point my phone at a menu and it will translate the whole thing. The lady at the front desk of the hostel and I can have a conversation in both our native languages and it can translate in real time for us. If I want to attempt talking myself I can practice because it will speak the words for me and I can repeat them. I used it to have a practice conversation with just now because I just had to speak Spanish on the phone to get a reservation straightened out, and as any non-native speaker will tell you, talking on the phone in your new language is TERRIFYING. Anyway, reservation figured out now thanks to Google Translate. Whole Trip is thanks to Google translate? I use it 500 times a day here.

I have a learn Spanish audiobook I’m listening to on and off as well. Mostly off because Queen Isabella just won’t be ignored. She just stole the crown of Castile from her sister! She dumped the King of Portugal! She is now 22! I have 13 hours left of that biography so I’m pretty sure she’s just getting started :-)

Just like my trip! Feels like Ive been gone a while but I’m not even half way done yet!