Thanks to my ongoing Spanish classes, supplemented by daily Duolingo lessons and consistent pestering of my Puerto Rican spouse (who could stand to show a little more interest in the finer points of the subjunctive, if you ask me), I have progressed in my Spanish learning to the “High Beginner/Low Intermediate” stage, according to the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. That’s where I take my classes.
Going off my experience during a recent trip to Mexico, being a High Beginner/Low Intermediate apparently means that I now speak the language well enough to get by in Latin America, mostly by saying ¿Qué? until my interlocutor gives up and starts talking in English.
Still, I’m proud of the headway I’ve made. You should have heard me ordering churros and inquiring about the location of the baño during my trip. You’d be like, High Beginner/Low Intermediate? More like Low Intermediate, full stop!
Or, as a guy at a Mexico City gay bar told me, “Your Spanish is not good, but I can understand what you mean.”
I loved Mexico City, by the way. In fact, the place prompted an update to my list of the 5 Best Cities I Have Ever Been To. Here they are, in alphabetical order:
- Chicago
- Istanbul
- Mexico City
- New York City
- Tokyo
As with the annual ranking of colleges and universities from U.S. News & World Report, I am unable to divulge the proprietary formula used to devise the list. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of complicated calculations involved. You have to factor in each city’s green space, multiplied by the number of hot guys I saw there, divided by how many days I had travelers’ diarrhea, then throw the Pythagorean theorem in there somewhere, and so on, QED, etc.
Could you even follow the math? Frankly, I have my doubts.
I can, however, tell you the runners-up cities (again, in alphabetical order): Buenos Aires, Miami, New Orleans, Paris, and San Francisco. I’ve never been to Berlin or Cape Town, but I have a good feeling about each of those, too.
After Mexico City, the itinerary for that recent trip south of the border included stops in San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato. In the latter town, my husband and I went on a callejoneada, which is a boisterous tour through the city’s backstreets, led by a jocular guide and a band of musicians.
The guide and the musicians wear old-timey, Don Quixote–era costumes. All talking is done in Spanish, so I, as a High-Beg/Low-Int, only caught like 13% of what was going on. Except, mind you, when it came to the shtick of the tambourine player, a guy who’d flirt cartoonishly with male tourgoers—eyelashes a-fluttering, wrists a-flailing, near-swoons a-near-swooning.
I knew exactly what was going on with that part of the performance, and it alarmed me a great deal because there’s only one thing worse than audience participation, and that would be homophobic audience participation conducted in a language I barely speak.
Fortunately, my strategy of avoiding eye contact with the mincing tambourine player worked, and I got through the experience without having to rebuff in a performative way his faux advances. But I was a nervous wreck.
Among the other participants on the tour, my favorite was an older woman who’d reply, to the guide’s repeated shouts asking us how we thought the evening was going, with a weary “Más o menos.” You were supposed to shout back a hearty “Bien!” But she went instead with the Spanish equivalent to “Meh.”
Same, señora. SAME.
Indirect Objects 