Revelations

Saturday, July 9

Last night, after our espicha, I came back and fell asleep. I guess I must’ve slept pretty hard, because I woke up around 6 in the morning and about four inches of my pillow were soaked with blood from what must have been a bad bloody nose.

Disgusting, right?

But I also immediately panicked, because I had no idea how to explain what happened to my host mom.

Even more awkward, when I got up for breakfast she had already set out my bowl of cereal and gone back to sleep. So I did the only logical thing I could do, and I left the pillow and a note explaining what had happened on the kitchen table.

The note read something to the effect of: “While I was sleeping, I had an accident with my nose. I didn’t know what to do. I’m sorry about the pillow.” Pretty elementary right? (Although, admittedly, in Spanish I used about 5 different tenses and a handful of pretty vocab.)

I was convinced she was going to think I ran into the wall while sleepwalking or something.

When I got back from our trip for the day, the first thing she does is walk me into my room, show me the cleaned pillow, and explain how she cleaned it. I thanked her about 20 times and apologized, and she was very nice about it and said it happens and that it wasn’t a big deal.

And then at dinner, we’re having our usual half-conversation/half-television time, and she stops for a second and tells me something interesting.

Your note this morning, she says to me in Spanish, was written really well. You just need to work on your conversation to be able to talk like that.

I almost didn’t know what to say. It’s sort of a backhanded compliment I guess, but I think she meant it as a way of saying that she was impressed.

I explained that my Spanish is embarrassing to me because I sound like a 2 year old and that I hate that I can’t express myself as well in this language as I can in English. I’ve tried to explain before that my major is English, so I think she got it when I said that I take a lot of pride in my abilities in English, which almost makes my Spanish worse.

It was kind of a silly moment, and I’m sure she didn’t mean to get me thinking. But her words are incredibly true; I do need to work on my Spanish a lot more. And while that’s why I’m here and the improvements have already been incredible, I know I’ll have a lot more to do when I get home. And my use of real Spanish - not just classroom versions - can’t end here, otherwise what good will I have done myself?