It’s a simple enough issue.
At several points during the day, I will be on the hunt for the (ban-YOS) banos.
Repeat after me….(Senor, donde estan los banos?)
If I can’t find anyone to ask, I will wander toward the back of the cafe/gas station/coffee shop/restaurant. I will bypass the door that says (OHM-breys) hombres. I also won’t go to the one marked (CAH-ba-YEROS) caballeros.
After all, I have a smattering of Spanglish! You can ask Kevin about my great language ability (though he’ll probably just tell you that he is a saint because he has to listen as I steadily & slowly pronounce signs like a babbling five-year old excited by her ability to sound out syllables).
Back to those banos.
I’ll be looking for the door marked (Moo-HAIR-ess) mujeres or maybe the one that says (DAHM-mass) damas. At the very least, I’m hopeful that I’ll see the silhouette of a curvacious woman wearing a starched-skirt dress from the fifties.
Recently, in the dimly-lit back room of a restaurant, the only door I found was a funny Alice-in-Wonderland-narrow-door with a tiny brass sign.
Now. A little more context might be required…during this month in Mexico, I have opened doors to find janitorial closets, mechanical storage and any number of randomly placed oddments that did NOT include a toilet or did indeed, include all of the aforementioned, AND a toilet…I’m telling you this so that you know I don’t just go grabbing doors willy-nilly.
Instead, I am the gringa standing in front of door numero (1!) uno, (2!) dos o (3!) tres, carefully considering her options, never quite sure what I’m about to find.
So. I stared at that shadowy-brass sign again. I sounded it out carefully…(lahh-DEEE-ess). I cast about in my rather-limited Spanish vocabulary for the meaning of this new word.
Nada. Nyet. Rien. Nothing. Clearly I’d exhausted my brain’s entire language larder.
I said it out loud again…(Lahh-DEEE-ess).
And then I started laughing.
I was still laughing while I washed my hands and I was laughing even harder when I rejoined Kevin at our table.
Maybe it’s time for some real Spanish lessons.
Or maybe just an English refresher course?
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Oh my gosh, you won’t believe how closely I relate to this story!!! When we go to Mexico I tote around a checkbook-sized English-Spanish dictionary, and am to be found in camionettas, taxis, buses, and on the beach, muttering Spanish words and phrases to myself, looking and sounding like a madwoman. My husband, though he appreciates my sparse Spanish (he has none) seems a bit embarrased by it all. My biggest gripe with any college-level language class I have attended is that there is no language lab attached. You know, that little room in the back where students in my high school would retire to don headphones, listen to tapes and endlessly repeat phrases. “Quelle heur est il? Il est huit heur moins dix.” “Quanta cuesta senor? Vente-uno pesos.” Lacking that, I am reduced to teaching myself, via a dictionary and a rudimentary grasp of how Romance languages aer structured. Oh my gosh–la-DEE-ess indeed!!
Oh Mandy…”Il est huit heur moins dix!” Were we listening to the same lesson? Too funny.
My cousin told me about a fabulous program called DuoLingo. It’s free (Mennonite Heart Flutter Alert!) and it does everything we want it to do.
You practise your pronunciation, it plays it back, it has lessons, the works. I was using it in Puerto Escondido but got lazy once we got to Todos and San Jose where everyone speaks English. I need to have no English coming near me in order to get into the process. I think I have to get back to Mexico and try again!