Close to trilingual!!

  Merida, Venezuela
Thursday, November 23, 2006

Well, Spanish class is going really well. I almost consider myself trilingual. I´m pretty functional at the moment, so that´s graet. I´ve been having some nice conversations on the street with a fair bit of success. Now when I´m speaking people don´t look at me like I´m speaking a foreign language....just like I´ve got the mother of all weird accents.

I had the BEST meal thus far in Venezuela today. It was this yummy chicken leg on a bed of mashed potatoes with a red pepper sauce....soooo good. The chicken was so tender I could just pull it off the leg with my fork..no knife required. Muy bueno!

Overall, the SPanish school experience is extremely positive here. I highly recommend it, even though it´s not as structured as Xela in Guatemala.

I´ve gotten a bit of a cold or something while I´ve been here...it´s a little uncomfortable. I´ve got a headache, a sore throat, a bit of a cough and a runny nose. However, part of me thinks that it might be the pollution here...there are SOOOO many cars, and we´re in a valley. Ugh. Or maybe it´s a virus...there seems to be something going around the language school.

My teacher and I discussed Chavez´s ¨Misiones¨ today...very interesting. Basically they´re social programs aimed at solving the various social problems here, like illiteracy, lack of post-secondary education that is free and easy to get into, dental problems, surgery backlogs (the obvious solution? send them to Cuba!). So yeah..very interesting stuff. Apparently there´s a professor in the area that is from the US and studies the Bolivar Revolution...I doubt if I´ll have the chance to meet him, but I´ll definitely look him up!

Tomorrow night I´m heading back to Caracas on an overnight bus, then I´ve got another night in Caracas, then it´s home time!