The Monday after we arrived, the girls and I walked the few blocks over to Casa Nica Spanish School to start our week of private classes. The girls are both learning German in school at home, so they shared a teacher to learn some Spanish basics. They also lucked out - their teacher's 8 year old daughter had the week off from her own school, so she joined them each day. In their two hours/day over the week, Judy covered several topics and played a lot of fun learning games. Zadie even started to like Spanish, which surprised me because she generally refuses to learn any Spanish at home and was not overly excited that I'd signed her up for the class. Ruth, much less surprisingly, learned a lot, and was comfortably reading menus and ordering for herself during our trip. She had already picked up many words from us in Guatemala and at home, but further expanded her vocabulary and started learning verb conjugations here.
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| Can you guess today's topic? 😄 |
My teacher and I were across the room at our own table, where my lessons consisted of conversation interspersed with a few lessons over the week for topics I asked her to review (will I ever nail por vs. para? time will tell). These conversation classes were great practice, but I was pretty brain-dead after talking for 2 hours straight. Very glad we chose 2 hours/day instead of 4! As with our volunteering day the weekend before, the most interesting part was learning about cultural differences through those discussions. Por ejemplo, Raquel talked about how most holidays, even Christmas, end with a big potluck block party out in the street with your neighbors with music and dancing late into the night. We talked a lot about gender norms as well.
Another thing I learned was that even though Grenada is on a huge lake, it's uncommon for Nicas to learn to swim. Further, neither of the teachers or their families had been in a swimming pool, since public swimming pools don't really exist even though many houses and hotels in town have them. One of them once visited a hotel with a previous student and had been kicked out for not wearing a swimsuit (many folks just wear t-shirts and shorts in the lake). After hearing that, we invited them all over for a Saturday afternoon pool party. Raquel couldn't make it, but Judy came with her daughter and older son. I especially loved seeing how much fun her daughter had jumping off the side, trying out the goggles, and relaxing on the floaties. The girls couldn't communicate with each other much, but that did not dampen the fun. Very memorable day for all, I hope, and a great way to cap off our week of learning. Thanks, Casa Nica!
