Troubles with the Spanish tongue

A year, a whole year I wasted with my Rosetta Stone Spanish language course. Learning how to say ‘my name is Yuri, I come from Moscow’ or ‘the granny has grey hair’, and a bunch of other classic irrelevant phrase book bollocks. Consequently as soon as I crossed the border to Mexico I had all the communications skills of a deaf mute. When the levels of frustration reached the same insufferable levels as the stench in my sleeping bag it was time to do something about both.

Finding an English teacher in this town of San Miguel de Allante is not hard, but finding a good one is. Jumping up and down, thi

A room with a picture postcard view

and local teacher procured it was time to stomp the ming out of my bag. Almost as worrying as putting my card in a foreign ATM machine was soaking the bag, will I ever get it back - to its pre soaking fluffy puffy form.

I dragged it like a sack of dead ducks to the roof top. It was too heavy for the washing line, so it bleed and drained its reluctant saturation from the railings. Three days of shaking and de-clumping, airing and relocating as the sun moved round the planet. But now it has the form of hot air balloon just before it’s ready for takeoff. I have not however managed to inflate my Spanish vocabulary quite so easy.

There are schools, proper schools for the students who have the ability to soak up knowledge like a down filled sleeping bag does water. Organized family stays to immerse yourself in the language and culture. I though, having all the saturation qualities of a ducks back, opted for a slower, up-close and personal approach. No one can accuse this teacher of going too fast. He clearly has some problems, possible stroke victim or vallium addict. He moves with the agility of gravity challenged sodden sleeping bag, he struggles with the continuity of the alphabet and drawing a clock face on the board was painful. In real time the hands he drew ware running late before completion. When he goes to look up a word in the dictionary he starts at 'a' for a word beginning with ‘t’ - ‘tocino', meaning bacon, that was after he tried to draw it in blue pen on the board to show us what it looked like.
I wouldn’t want him on my team at Pictionary; incidentally the wall supporting the whiteboard resembles a dart board wall, with blue spots around the outside of it from stray stabs with the marker pen. We spent a good 15 minutes deciding that ‘col’ was cauliflower and not cabbage. He reminds me of cross between Gordon Brown, with his slow but deliberate buffoon type manner, a prolonged certainty that inevitably ends in forgotten actions; and John Merck the Elephant Man, intelligence trapped inside a dysfunctional body. Despite these insulting similarities, this man is a really lovely honest man, with enthusiasm and a massive heart, all be it of questionable performance. I thought he was going to cry at the end of our last lesson when Andy gave him a pair of £1 Tesco reading glasses, ‘For me? How sweet’. Arrhh, bless.

At first it was annoying, he was going to be fired after the first excruciating lesson, but we gave him one more chance, a morning lesson, when the body still has some resilience against the numbing medication, when the coherence is at comprehensible levels. Thankfully his grasp of exchange rates is equally inaccurate, so what we lack in translation we make up for in transaction. He even had a new haircut the next day, surely a treat from his unexpected boost in income, I would have remarked but didn’t pay attention when we did the word for haircut, well why would I?

Anyway we reasoned we aren’t that quick either, we need slowness to take this stuff in. So we actually complement each other quite well.

I still feel like I'm on the edge, at any moment all this knowledge will fall into place and I will become a cunning linguist of the Spanish tongue. I can see myself talking Spanish in my sleep or suddenly bursting forth with a mouth full of sentence at an appropriate opportunity when all things a line with my retained vocabulary and an audible, comprehensible, grammatically correct stream of words will be spouted with assertion and confidence. A perfect dialect and emphasis on the accented letters of the words. Relayed so faultlessly and more importantly understood but the intended receiver, that will result in a hushed reverence at my linguistic skills, as all around, behind hidden mouths onlookers will whisper, that surely I must be some kind of albino Mexican to have such a perfect grasp of the language. Actually that will only happen in my sleep, my dreams, not in reality, although I did order red sauce with my lunch the other day, sauce being ‘molé’ pronounced ‘moe-lay’ as in guacamole, but when the word was looked up in the wrong side of my Spanish/English dictionary was described as ‘as small black fury mammal with sharp pointy teeth. An untrustworthy sauce of underground information. But there are lots of similarities; ‘in an organization a mole is the sauce of the information’.
Dirty is ‘sue-c-o’, so now we know Phil Collins was singing about a dirty Spaniard.

Anyway word association combined with my ‘Michel Thomas’ audio lessons means it is all coming together, I have no time to ride, no time to write, go out or speak to the locals, but like a garage band rehearsing in private, I have bedroom Spanish. Pretty soon I will go out on tour and see if I can spread the word, whether it will be understood, and if the reply is comprehensible remains to be seen.
We have a room with the most amazing dome brick ceiling,

another ancient town of Spanish construction, with a bright blue high altitude sky pieced with the spires and bell towers of numerous churches and cathedrals,

that all ring out of sync, without punctuality or meaning, but with an acceptable noise pollution that compliments the tweeting sparrows morning chorus from the hanging flowering plants that cascade down from the sleeping bag airing balcony. Lying in bed with morning soft focus on impossible angles and construction, not arched enough to hold its self up, the agony of analyzing how it possible came to shape with symmetrical herring bone precision occupies one sense whilst unfathomable audibly time announcements play havoc with another sense, all this as I’m trying to recall and make sense the simplest of Spanish sentence is actually a wonderful way to start the days awearness.

Speaking of awareness, we found ourselves entering in a very dodgy Mexican bar where the urinal is unhidden and right next to the least preferred table, breeze blocks walls are painted red (to hide the blood?) it’s not exactly a calming colour. The bar entrance has swing saloon doors and would be cliché in any other place, but here it is authentic and not for foreigners to see, frequent or god forbid actually come through and drink in.

However after a nice safe clean, expensive roof top sunset, guide book recommended beer,

it was time for something darker and seedier, man did we come up trumps. I had just the right amount of beer in me to deal with such a place. Stone cold soba and I would have turned right around, drunk, and I like to think I would have decided I’d had enough, but at this particular stage of acquiring a Friday night celebration feeling after a week of alcohol abstinent and audible absorption; I had the perfect combined ingredients and drive to continue to walk to the bar, as conversation is hushed and all eyes are upon us. The choice is beer, ‘ya want it or not?’ No umbrellas in voluminous glasses shading multicoloured liquids. No voluminous women in multicoloured dresses. This is a place to come to to escape the hard world and indulge in some hard drinking and dirty lovin’, ‘Cheers’ it is not – everyone may know your name but no one gives a shit. The women are whores and huge beyond any beer goggles. Not the kind of women for picking up, unless you have a forklift.

One lucky punter got 2 minutes in the stinking toilet for his hard earn Pesos,

a drunken decision that was perhaps a little rash, and that, will be his only recollection of the encounter. Two old men with cowboy hats and droopy moustaches serenade the matchless couple during their post transaction dance, with guitar and accordion.

No one bats an eye. We too have blended in (as well as a gringo can against red walls, even a chameleon would be challenged), but when opportunism and intrigue are combined with alcohol courage and nicotine addiction, I'm approached; I understand she wants money for cigarettes, having her full attention, her full figure in my face a number so large, I haven’t learnt to count that high yet; I use my slurred Spanish to confirm her request and ask what I will get from the deal. Not having learnt the word for blow job yet, although I made a mental note to put it on the list of things to find out, along with wet and dry, (for riding conditions of course, nothing sanded or sordid about those words.) I was able to ask for a kiss and my 5 Pecos was not entirely wasted nor was a week long course I have the Spanish tongue.
After 2 beers and no blood spilled we decided it was time to leave and count our blessings on washed and scrubbed hands because I don’t want to be putting any other filthy things in my mouth.

I was quite proud of my newly acquired linguistic skills, but then paying for breakfast the following day, instead of telling us the total bill she said half the amount from both of us, and utter confusion ensued. Why couldn’t you just say 60? I feel once again I am back at day one. Like guitar playing and surfing, speaking a foreign language is just something I will only ever watch other people do.

Today we were supposed to move on but the pulled back curtains revealed a grey and wet November morning the first rain I've seen in over 2 months and best viewed from the window of a comfortable room than from a wiped and smeared visor.

When I eventually press my starter button again, I think sign posts will have meaning and like a movie with subtitles I will get the gist, I just have too. I have so much to say, it’s a crime to be lost in translation.