Dejar es difícil — leaving is hard

 

End of classes

I showed someone some of the previous post’s Spanish. The good news is it was comprehendible. The bad news is it was only just comprehendible 😂. (It apparently isn’t too bad, especially given I didn’t use the translate app to write it, just lookup verbs).

The end of the morning class featured the certificate handing out and usual photos etc for everyone. Because every week some students go, and some join, every departure ceremony you go to on Fridays isn’t really that emotional, we always said big goodbyes and “I will miss you” etc, sometimes they are people you only met 5 days ago. 

Today I discovered (in retrospect, unsurprisingly) it’s rather different when you are the one leaving. This Friday I was really feeling it. Saying goodbye to two of my classmates I had only met 5 days ago was sad, the one I met 2 weeks ago was really sad. The one student who started when I did, 6 whole weeks ago — not sure I’ll ever recover!

The ceremonies are at lunchtime, but of course some students (like myself) have private classes after lunch. Leaving my final class which finished at 5pm was quite a weird feeling. There are very few people still around at that time, combined with when you leave you go through the secure door with bars on it, and it locks with an audible clunk, meant that as I left I pulled closed and was solidly locked out of Tico Lingo. Something like the Hollywood stereotype of the prison door closing and locking — except I was leaving.

I lie here now in my casa tica, one more nights sleep, one more breakfast. It’s a strange feeling, I’ve only been here 6 weeks, but it feels like 6 months.

Tomorrow I give my big backpack to Freddy, a professor at Tico Lingo who has agreed to look after it for me while I travel Central America where I don’t need the cold weather/hiking gear. Tomorrow night I’m staying in a nice hotel (I splashed out for one with a big bed and a nice modern shower!), and finally Sunday I fly.

Ultima dia, un historia

Ultima diá. 

Last day. 

Estoy triste por eso, no quiero ir, pero todas las cosas buenas debe llegar a terminar. Yo dejo mi familia tica en sabado por la mañana, pero viernes es mi ultima todo diá, y mi ultima diá de escuela. (aunque, yo acualamente dejo Costa Rica en domingo -- yo voy a dormir en un hotel circa de aerupuerto por mañana por la noche) 

I am sad, I don't want to go, but all good things must come to an end. I leave my homestay family on Saturday morning, but Friday is my last full day, and my last day of school. (Although, I actually leave Costa Rica on Sunday, I will sleep in a hotel near the airport tomorrow night).

Me siento que yo hice progreso bueno, a pesar de que fui despacio. Si yo tuve dos mas semanas, pienso voy a poder hace muy bien. Con quatro mas semanas, tal vez yo voy a poder conjugate mi verbos correctamente.

I feel that I made good progress, even though I was slow. I think with two more weeks, I would have been able to do really well. With four more weeks, maybe I could even conjugate my verbs correctly.

Voy a extrañar a mi familia tica y mi profesores y profesoras. Fué un seis semenas dificiles. Seis semanas intensos, muy intensos, muy agotadors. Pero, en la fin, yo disfruté eso todo (ok, casi todo).

I will miss my Costa Rican family and my professors. It was 6 hard weeks, 6 intense weeks, very intense, very exhausting. But, in the end, I enjoyed it all (ok, almost all). 

Tuve alguno tiempos buenos con mi mamá tica, nosotros dijimos alguno historias divertido, y a veces nos reímos de mi español mal. Yo enseñe su la cancion de "a b c" en ingles, y ella enseñó me eso en español. Noche nosotros hicimos "tongue twisters" en español. Tristes tigres tragaban trigo en un trigal. Pero, la palabra "probablemente" es suficiente por me.

I had some good times with my Costa Rican mum, we told some funny stories, and sometimes we laughed at my bad Spanish. I taught her the "a b c's" song in English, and she taught me it in Spanish. Tonight we did tongue-twisters in Spanish. 3 sad tigers swallowed wheat in a wheat field. (Tristes tigres tragaban trigo en un trigal). Although, the word "probablemente" (Probably) is enough for me. 

Y sí, necesité buscar algunas palabras para escribo esto. Y sí, esto tuvo mucho tiempo a escribir

And yes, I needed to lookup some words in order to write this. And yes, this took a long time to write.

Only 2.5 more days

 It’s only taken five and a half weeks, and I’m starting to feel like I’m finally getting there. Listening comprehension is much better, though — of course —vocab has a way to go. When I do know the words I can hear and recall them and mostly work out what the sentence is without having to stop and think about it. The issue has been that even if I know the word, eg también, I haven’t been able to easily associate it with the meaning when I hear it verbally (“also”), but I can say and pronounce it easily, and comprehend it when I read it, but the association of the sounds to words has been harder. I hear “también” and have to “write it” in my head and then “read” what I wrote. But now I feel I’m finally getting better at linking the spoken word to the meaning.

I definitely feel I need a break, but I also feel that given a couple more weeks, I would really improve a lot. Maybe on my travels I’ll get that experience. 

I am quite sad that it’s only a few more days before I leave. I have loved my time at my homestay, Mizonil has been amazing, I really lucked out with her. I hear from other students they deal with things like no water on the weekends, or bugs, or other such things. My biggest complaint is there is ONE mosquito in my room that buzzes when I sleep. I don’t want anyone to get the impression that the home stays aren’t good — they really are, and they are enormously helpful for learning Spanish, but I got very lucky with mine. 

Last week!

It’s amazing what 5 weeks of intensive study will do for you. I mean, I bet it is amazing. For me I feel like I’m about at week 3 of knowledge, but I’m ok with that — I went in with the goal of learning “some” Spanish, and I succeeded at that by the end of day one. So everything afterwards is a bonus. 

I feel like I’m now, finally, able to recall the nouns and verbs I need, and conjugate them appropriately (for presente simple, preterite, and the “voy a” hack for futura), and I’m getting better at reflexive verbs — I’m now able to shower myself! 

I have a new private teacher this week, she’s good. We are practicing conversations — that’s the most important thing I’m going to need for the next 5 months. I will leave reading Don Quixote in the original Spanish till after I get back.

Next plans — my large backpack is going to Freddy’s place on Wednesday, so I’ll be down to just that small backpack. Thank goodness, the large one is embarrassing, but it’s the medication, sleeping bag, mat, and cold weather gear that takes up so much room.

I finally found what looks like a decent outdoor store — I stupidly forgot a dry bag for inside my backpack, which is pretty stupid thing to forget for the backpacking I’m gonna be doing.

Speaking of which, I think I’m gonna go visit a lost city in Colombia after Panama.

Finally, in Africa news — travel insurance purchased and the trip deposit is paid!

Una semana más

One more week. 5 more days until I’m totally fluent in Spanish — that’s how it works, right?

My class I’ve had for the previous week. The guy beside me is our teacher. I have him again next week, but in the afternoons I have a different private teacher. Be interesting to see how that goes.

I permanently have “Que significa…” and “como se dice…” stuck in my head, phrases that mean “what does… mean” and “how do you say…” respectively — we say them so often!

I’m going out to get some stuff tomorrow that I’ll need for the next few weeks, but they are only minor items. I’m still lugging around lots of my medication — I brought 6 months worth and it’s only been 1.5 months, it’s bulky and annoying. In hindsight given the rather easy availability of medications in Costa Rica, I could have saved myself a lot of baggage space by simply buying what I needed here! 

I’m looking forward to the next part of my trip, given how much mental energy doing these classes has taken from me, it really feels like I’ve done nothing else (and I really haven’t). There were lots of weekend trips I could have taken advantage of, but my brain needed to vege out — speaking the weekend speaking Spanish with strangers would have killed every last brain cell. But from here onwards, hopefully it’s all about the travel. 

Classes and glasses

This week (esta semana), I am repeating the previous weeks class (repitiendo la clase de la hace semana), however this is a good thing, because that sentence above says “me repeating the class from a week ago.” 

Poco a poco

Poco a poco — little by little, a favourite saying around here, meaning that you learn spanish a little bit at a time, but with only 3 weeks(!!) left of my time at Tico Lingo, I really need grande a grande else I feel I’m going to still be saying lo siento, sólo hablo un poco de español — I’m sorry, I only speak a little Spanish. I probably will always say that, even if I magically got to conversational level in the next 3 weeks.

Still learning!

I’ve had a bit of a sore throat the last two days, but it seems everyone in the class has it, so I guess it’s going around.

In class I’m doing well, we’re going over stuff I already have a tiny bit of knowledge on, so it’s a good chance to practice it. My confidence in my own speaking abilities is improving — I’m still not able to comprehend or compose in realtime, but it’s getting there. 

Of course somethings you learn how to say very well very quickly — ¿cómo se dice …? — how do you say… and ¿qué significa…? — what does … mean?

Status update

I’ve avoided posting an update on how the learning is going for fear of somehow jinxing it. But it’s going well enough now that I feel I can risk it.

In general I’m doing really well, we are all doing well and the teacher is great — we’re going at exactly the right pace, and everyone is getting multiple chances at trying new structures and phrases.

Today we started on irregular verbs. Spanish has regular verbs that can be conjugated easily (eg “comer” means “to eat”, and you can say “I eat” by changing the “er” to “o”, and he eats by changing it to “e”, and we eat by changing the “er” to “emos”, so “comemos cada día” — we eat every day”. But Spanish can’t be too easy, so there are a bunch of irregular verbs where those easy rules don’t always work. Unfortunately there are no rules for those verbs, so you just have to remember the exceptions.

So we had fun using various verbs and building sentences using the syntax we’ve learned. It’s actually been a lot of fun.

The one on one tuition I have in the afternoon is… different.. though I must confess, I start off each lesson skeptical of what he’s asking me to do, and end up acknowledging it was really good.

As for what my day is like:

• 06:45 wake up
• About 06:50 have breakfast
• Usually 07:00 do the morning ablutions
• 07:15 dressed and pack bag.
• About 07:20 head to school. 
• Depending how lazy I’m feeling and whether I stop at a bakery, I get to school around 07:35 to 07:55. (It’s a 1.5km walk to school)
• Class starts at 08:00. 
• 10:00 break for morning tea — eat a banana or other fruit.
• 10:15 class resumes — probably more verbs in different tenses and conjugations.
• 12:00 class ends, lunch time.
• Quickly go buy food if I didn’t get any on the way in.
• 12:30 keep practicing, studying.
• 13:00 private 1:1 tuition starts
• 15:00 walk home.
• When I get home talk to my mamá de tico for a little bit.
• 16:00 homework and study.
• 18:00 dinner time!
• 19:30 I usually call it quits for study. 
• Sometimes I then take the lessons and type up charts and rules in my laptop to help make them stick and to use as reference later.
• And/or I watch Netflix. If I’m not totally exhausted I’ll watch a movie or TV episode that I’ve seen before, but dubbed in Spanish. 
• 21:00 bed time, sleeping not long after.
• Then repeat the next day.

Weekend

 I'm hesitant to post a positive update, since the last two times I did that things then turned to custard.

Monday I'm in a different class, another beginners one, but this time everyone has zero previous experience with Spanish. I'm happy about this. It's also my first week with private tuition. 8am to midday group class, then 1pm to 3pm for private. Gonna be intense.

On that note, I've done a bunch more self study this weekend, and am feeling better. My spanish is still very low, I catch words now, but that is at least something. I understood the word for breakfast, and the word for eight, so I figured that breakfast was at 8am. I was right.

I went down to, forgive me, a Walmart (yes, there's a Walmart in Heredia) to buy a bunch of cheap things. Notably cheap shoes. The reason? I only have hiking boots and jandals, and I want something in between.

I'm going to try adapting my morning routine somewhat. 6am wake up and go for a maybe 20-30min run, get back around 6:45am, shower, change, then breakfast at 7am, and walk to school at 7:30am for the 8am start. I suspect I'll only do that 3 days a week, but we shall see. Next blog post might be "nope, not gonna exercise".

Hopefully classes are easier this week.

Day 3

Learning pace of class slowed down today, I felt like my head was now just above water. Instead of long sentences with no explanation of what was going on we now talked about when to use es vs estar. Still not 100% sure on it, but I managed to figure out a bunch of it.

Day 2

Fuck.

Day 1 — Estoy Cansado

Wow, my brain is melted. Estoy cansado — I am tired. I thought initially, as we learn the very basics — hello, I want, you want, they want, we want — that I’d be ok.

But no, it very quickly evolved.

It felt like the language school version of this:

But nonetheless, I am learning. Touch slower than others, but they also sensibly did some Duo Lingo before coming here (cheaters!).

We also had a walking tour of Heredia after class, and i now have some local currency and an approximate idea of the conversion. (Half USD times a thousand. So USD $10 is about 5,000 colones).

My brain is fried, but dinner is shortly and hopefully that should help. Tomorrow I shall pickup some brain food (other than agua — water) to help keep me going.

The next stage begins

A rather chaotic last week, with a bunch of problems occurring. Fortunately the larger hurdles have been overcome, so all ahead full.

In 2 hours I’ll be getting on my flight to Madrid. Once there I need to kill about 6 hours until a short 10h30m flight to Bogotá in Columbia. Arriving at 5am I’m sure I’ll feel refreshed and ready to wait 3hrs till my final flight to San Jose, Costa Rica. 

Tico Lingo have been great and sent me the info pack on who is picking me up and who I’ll be staying with. Wali is picking me up and taking me to stay with Mizonil and her son Alonso.

After that, I’ll probably sleep for 24 hours 😀