Do you speak Latin?

So I realized my subconscious remembers more Italian than I do. I’ve taken many years of French starting in high school, 6 weeks of Italian while in Rome and one semester of Spanish my last year of college. I quickly realized everyone in the Spanish class was a business or engineering major just looking for an easy credit and not serious about learning Spanish. So I stopped trying along with everyone else. The class was only an hour-long, but I along with my classmates would pick a practice exercise to skip by escaping to the bathroom. I can’t remember if I ever went twice in one class…but I know I considered it. We’d compete to get out of the more boring exercises. It was a shame because I had wanted to try to learn Spanish but that class wasn’t the right forum for that. I stopped studying and would just guess based on how similar the words were to French or Italian words. I did “study” for the final with the aid of tequila and that did get me an A for the course. So it’s really no surprise that in Mexico I could speak better tequila than I could Spanish. But it is a surprise that I started speaking Italian. Usually French is my go to language-even in China I would try to speak French to people. My brain processes a foreign language and spits out French. But here for the first time it was Italian that came spitting out. I guess my subconscious was smart enough to know it wasn’t French but not smart enough to know the difference between Spanish and Italian. I kept popping out with phrases and my sister would look at me confused and tell me that it wasn’t Spanish I was speaking. I did once hear a French song on the radio and excitedly thought I was understanding a Spanish song. However,  my Spanish class method of guessing words based on their similarity to French or Italian worked for reading museum captions. Eventually I think I will have fluently re-created Latin.

Of course the best is when I think I understand a story and really have created my own story. For example on the day of my sister’s niece’s baptism her brother-in-law told a story: I thought his story was that at his son‘s baptism his son was sleeping but when the water hit him he jerked awake and hit his mother in the face. The real story was that this morning he was sleeping when he suddenly jerked awake and saw his son standing in the doorway sleep walking and in his surprise he threw his arm across his wife and hit her in the face. As you can see I highlighted the words that I had correctly interpreted, but the story around them I had completely changed…

Did you forget your shoe polish?

I’ve been surprised by what does or does not come standard in international hotel rooms before. Notably the lack of alarm clocks or tissues. But this time in Mexico it was more specifically what was found in the bathroom: shoe polish. What I had thought originally was a shower cap was actually shoe polish. I rarely see anyone who uses shoe polish, let alone finding it in the bathroom. Too bad the polish wasn’t yellow to match the shoes I was wearing…

Soap, shampoo, and shower cap, right?

They were right, I did forget mine…

“I’ll shake your hand if I can use your sanitizer afterward”

Nobody actually said that but it was certainly implied. In Mexico people greet with a handshake and a kiss on the cheek. With all of the swine flu and regular flu epidemics I’ve become a hand sanitizer junkie. Well, that’s a lie, I’ve always been one but now I don’t look so out of place. At my brother-in-law’s niece’s baptism I watched all the family members greet each other and then whip out the sanitizer.

The hand shake and kiss were a problem all on their own. I knew I’d had problems with greetings previously, but I keep learning new ways I can make a hello awkward. After the double kiss in France I always felt unfinished waiting for my second kiss in Mexico. Closer friends would pull you into a hug as well-and on that I never got the timing right. I was forever getting my hand shaking arm caught between me and the hugger while they embraced me tightly. I’m a bad hugger in general and with my arm trapped I was too preoccupied to hug with the other arm and was just hopping not to have my should dislocated while I tried to figure out how other people got their arms out in time. Or maybe they did leave the arm in there but some how positioned it less awkwardly between their bodies. I have no idea since I was never able to do it right. Perhaps they could add appropriate greetings to the flight attendant repertoire. Imagine her showing the exits and then demonstrating the appropriate greeting of the country with her fellow attendant.

Seeing Double

One night in Guadalajara we went to dinner at a nice restaurant. We had a delicious dinner followed by a dancing performance. The dancers told us they would return again in an hour so we decided to wander the restaurant to await their return. It looked kind of like a jungle so we were wandering paths (careful not to ‘invade’ the garden of course) until we stumbled upon a hookah bar upstairs with a live band already playing. We decided to chill out and listen for a while. It was a crazy looking bar-totally different from the restaurant, complete with naked constellations on the ceiling. The waitress asked for our drink orders. My sister and I each ordered a margarita, her husband a beer, his brother and dad a beer each. Well when the waitress came back there was an explosion of drinks. We then remembered that an hour earlier we’d heard a bar promotion of a “2 for 1 special.” But we’d forgotten and the waitress certainly didn’t remind us! And they were big margaritas! His dad pocketed the excess beers (too bad the margaritas didn’t come in to-go-cups) and when two days later his mother complained of thirst during a long drive he magically produced 3 beers from his messenger bag. Dos margaritas, por favor!

Recalculating

That’s what our GPS (who we have creatively named “The Lady”) is always telling me when I drive. And though she says it with patience I know she’s really getting annoyed with me. But her calm voice was noticeably missing in Mexico. Apparently a GPS has not been made for Mexico yet. How do you know where to go? Good question. Apparently you stop every few hours and check in with someone local. Additionally roads apparently change all the time. Like the one in Mexico City that has a small sign posted that the one way boulevard reverses the direction in which it is one way from something like 9am – 11am. I’d like to hear the Lady freaking out when you forget and get on going the wrong way. What about if you are in the area at 8:59? Will she tell you to go right or left?

Additionally tolls are set up at different intervals with fixed prices no matter how long you have been on the road for. So imagine our chagrin after we pay a toll, then take an exit one sooner than the one we needed. But when we try to get back on to take the exit further down we accidentally get on the wrong entrance so we are going back the way we came-which is back through the toll. So we have to pay it, turn around, and pay it a 3rd time. Luckily my brother-in-law saw a road worker and showed him our receipt and he graciously let us pull a U-turn and skip the two extra toll passes!

Last week I made the same error going on a bridge to New Jersey. Of course I paid the toll each time…