Spanish lessons

We landed in Mexico City late last night. Another one of those delicious cultural jolts. All the stories of the big, bad megatropolis with its shanties and pollution and bandidos - you anticipate something wonderously terrifying. So far, it´s been big, it´s been busy, but it´s been good. It´s been a new experience to walk down streets that feel as if they have layers of history under the very earth- certainly true of the Zocalo , the central square with the cathedral built on the Spanish-made ruins of an Aztec temple. After Auckland, Sydney, LA, this sense of history is comforting.

But really, it´s all about language. For most of our trip, English has been the default language. We tried to speak a bit of Thai, Cambodian and Vietnamese but struggled with pronunciation and script etc. Didn´t get much past thank you, that´s was delicious. Here, English is not the lingua franca and people do not immediately launch into our language to make it easier for us. Why should they? Doesn´t most of the world speak Spanish anyway? most of the US does surely? And it´s amazing how far a 13 year-old GCSE in Spanish can take you. Especially, if you´re fired up by rescuing damsels at the airport and raging about lack on in-flight entertainment and refreshments.

LA international confiscated our precious water and Mexicana denied us drink for the first hour and a half of the flight. Then they lost the bag of a lovely girl called Brigid. Maybe it´s still in LA. Maybe it´s gone back to Fiji. The guy on the helpline had no more information. Brigid has no clothes. But in the way of these things, these crises diverted us from the more minor concern of getting into Mexico City without begin robbed or conned by the malicious taxi touts everyone had warned us about. And I got to speak the first extended bit of Spanish I{ve spoken since the GCSE. And I remembered how wonderful it is to try to speak another language even if you are perhaps a little rusty and speak more of a Franco Italian hybrid. The taxi driver was my first test, and I manageds to negotiate some kind of deal to get us to two hotels without further stranding Brigid in the big city. A minor vitory, but I went to bed with a ridiculous sense of achievement. I´ve achieved little other than a good suntan for about five months. Sometimes, active participation in the most banal activities beats a trip to a famous museum for entertainment.

I can´t tell you how happy this makes me, to try a bit of another language. It looks like we won{t be able to afford Spanish classes in Oaxaca so I´m taking my linguistic kicks where I can get them.