Eureka!

Today something pretty cool happened. I realized halfway through the day that this morning I managed to properly convey my thoughts and have a fluid conversation with my mom regarding the trash/recycling problem in Córdoba. There had been something on the news about trash, and that sparked a nice breakfast conversation about recycling, landfills, and the many uses of compost. While this was all very interesting and enjoyable to talk about, the trash problem is not what I got excited about as I was sitting in class today. This morning marked one of the first times that I had limited problems expressing myself and only had to look up one word during our conversation (waste: desperdicio). After all of the frustration of the past few weeks, this was fairly comforting to me.

One of the hardest aspects of being in a foreign country is simply the fact that it's hard to get to know people or show others your actual personality when you can't speak properly. You don't know the local colloquialisms, you don't have your signature catchphrases, you don't even move the same way when you speak. This makes adjusting to a new country with new people and customs very difficult. It's exhausting.

However, today made me realize that no matter how bad I think I am at Spanish right now (and I'm still pretty bad), I actually am improving. Today I thought back to last semester when I was taking a conversation class at Ithaca, and it's kind of amazing how bad I ACTUALLY was at speaking then. The difference between December and now is huge, so I can only imagine how much I'll have improved by August. I've been fretting recently (due mostly to my frustration with the language barrier) that I won't really have made any strides by the time I leave Argentina. I see now that this is impossible, as I can really only get better from here on out. Ya, I'll definitely still have work to do, but just being around native speakers is making me better in itself.

I still fully expect many frustrating moments in the next 5 months, and many more "I CANNOT SPEAK SPANISH" freak outs. However, my Thomas Edison light bulb moment today has helped me realize that I just need to take it in stride. So here's to being one step closer to fluency. Everyone raise your alfahores. I'll explain those in another entry. They're too ridiculously delicious and full of dulce leche and beef fat to go into detail here.