A day in San Miguel

Two weeks after I arrived here, my blog is finally in San Miguel. My fan can rejoice. That’s you Zoe. Oh yea, and you Dad. Two! I can use the plural. I have aficionados, fans. How wonderful. But really, what’s kept me so busy?

Well, days here are long. They start at about 7 a.m.—a healthy, wealthy and energy-wise hour to rise. And accomplished with the help of just three alarms: my cell phone, a small battery-powered clock and the sun. Each morning I turn the first two off, climb back into bed, and the third gets me up in time to make 8 a.m. desayuno.

My nearly daily meal is a bowl of fruit—papaya, apple, bananas and sometimes mango or kiwi­—sprinkled with granola and a few hefty dollops of yogurt. It’s often washed down with pineapple, grape or peach juice, or, every now and then, fresh squeezed orange juice. Yup, I get all my daily fruit servings right there at the kitchen counter.

Once finished, I walk the three minutes down the hill to the school and begin eight hours of classes. First up: pronunciation. For nearly an hour, the lenguas of my classmates and I slur through vocales—both fuerte and débiles—twist into diptongos and flubber over guturales. Repeat with me our daily opening anthem: aeo, aiu, aeo, aua, aei, eui, oua, oai. No, I won’t make you do it all. The biggest mistake I ever made? I once drank a chamomile tea with breakfast. My tongue slept all through class. Never again.

After the oral weight-lifting, I head to three hours of general Spanish, now grouped by ability. I’m in level four, taught by Paula (pronounced Pow-la), along with three other students. (For the first two weeks, there was just one other, but we added some bodies midway through the four-week session.) Class discussions include the conditional verb form, the best way to cook tenderloin—in a pressure cooker submerged in cerveza, apparently—how to give commands, and the current state of Mexican politics—caliente, hot, according to Paula.

I have learned a number of things in my next course, Twentieth Century Hispanic Literature. First, I recognize a lot of words. Second, recognizing a word doesn’t mean you can remember what it means. Third, even when you remember what the words mean, that doesn’t mean you can understand the sentence. Fourth, even when you understand the sentence, or even the paragraph, you never understand the story. Fifth, never read poetry in Spanish.

I walk uphill to my home with head pounding and confidence high. I am, during that walk, confident I will never learn Spanish. The more I learn, the less I know, to paraphrase Socrates. And then there's the pain between my eyes. Consequently, comida, as lunch is called in Mexico, is usually a silent meal. I groan to Lourdes ‘Me duele la cabeza’, ‘I have a headache’, and tell her the name of the culprit of the day: Pablo Neruda, Rosario Castellanos, Jorge Luis Borges. She nods; she's seen nine years of dispirited lunchtime students.

Fortunately, lunch is the largest meal of the day in Mexico, so there is plenty of work to be done that precludes conversation. Typically, comida starts off with a sopa, or soup, of boiled vegetables or puffed corn kernels. The main dish varies widely. I’ve had bean and cheese tacos, American-style spaghetti, rice and a calabaza-carne de vaca (squash and beef) mix and the well-known chile relleno (stuffed and fried peppers). It’s all washed down with jugo (juice) or occasionally one of various atoles: canela, arroz, chocolate. The cinnamon, rice or chocolate drink is sweet, a bit thicker than a typical hot chocolate and, happily for my lactose-discriminating stomach, light in milk.

After lunch, I retreat to my room and collapse on my bed, felled by this soporific combination: a bellyful of food and a head full of Spanish. Yet as sleep seldom comes to me in the middle of the day, especially as my mind continues obstinately to translate every piddling English thought to Spanish, it is a short-lived collapse. I often end up reading an old sixth grade Spanish exercise book. I don’t understand that either, but it has pretty pictures.

To be continued...