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Trip Start Jan 26, 2011 Previous
Entry Trip End May 24, 2011

  Puerto Viejo, Province of Limon, Costa Rica
Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Every Monday morning between February and May 2009, I took a photo of myself in my underwear. Aside from the obvious artistic merits of such an activity (for an erotic yet tasteful collage please e-mail me at elltrev@hotmail.com), it also allowed me to track the progress that I was making at the gym during that period. As I reach the end of my time in Central America, and in the absence of an equivalent technique with which to measure my ability to speak Spanish, it's difficult to tell how far my language skills have come over the last four months or so. I suppose the truth is that I know I have made significant improvements - I have memorised at least seven hundred new words or phrases, and learned a number of grammatical rules that I simply did not know before. But the other side of the coin is that I do not feel as though I have made significant improvements. I think that this is in part because they occur in such small increments. You may have heard the story that if you place a frog in a pan of cold water, and then slowly heat it to 100 degrees, the poor amphibian will quietly sit there as it boils to death, due to an inability to detect the gradual increases in temperature. Whilst this is probably a load of bollocks, it works as a nice metaphor for how I feel.

The other possibility is that I genuinely haven't improved in terms of my ability to understand spoken Spanish and, being a glass-half-empty kind of guy, that I am focusing on that. How could I have learned hundreds of new words of a language and yet not be better able to understand it, I hear you cry? Well, because my problem has never been translating words that people say to me; it's hearing them in the first place. I have therefore decided to place the blame for my apparent weakness on the people of Central America, for their uncouth accents. Specifically, their apparent distaste for consonants. At times it seems they can scarcely bear to pronounce them at all. Their speech is like a fast-flowing river of vowels, punctuated by barely distinguishable (or even detectable) gaps where there should be a 'g', 'm' or 'd'. It's as if any prolonged contact between the lips, teeth and / or tongue would cause them some form of immense pain, forcing them to hop between consonants like a person tip-toes lightly but rapidly over hot sand.  'Managua' becomes 'Manaua'. 'Estabamos' becomes 'estaao'.

Of course, it is their language, and so they may be justified in telling me that they're going to speak it however they damn well please. Plus this is coming from a guy who pronounces 'I think that I am going to go' as 'I think 'm g'nna go'.

Anyway, I may as well use this opportunity to wrap up what has turned out to be a rather half-arsed blog. This trip has definitely felt much less 'significant' on a personal level than my previous one, but that was a) inevitable, and b) not necessarily a bad thing. And, on the plus side, it feels like a very long time since I've met so many great people in such a short space of time. You know who you are.... white-haired-American-guy-who's-always-in-Baviera.

i Hasta luego !

x

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