Language and Stories

Ahora– right now– I am thinking en una mix de Español y English. I've just come from la clase de Español, and I am happy to say that this class makes me think in Spanish rather than stop thinking, which was the case a year ago. On the sidewalk, I have to stop myself from saying "hola" and I thanked the person who held the door open for me with "gracias." But now I am in cross-cultural psychology, an appropriate place to write about this code-switching, and the professor is talking about education in America, and he is using English to do this, and I must write in English para ustedes (for yall), so I am thinking more and more in English now.

As for my typing, also Spanglish. It just takes a keystroke to switch from the English layout to the Spanish layout, which is just a slight modification of the QWERTY layout. But my fingers lag a little behind, and when I try to make parenthesis, it doesn´t work right )like this=. Typing in Spanish used to be very slow for me, with the accents and the switched up punctuation, but now the only thing I am slow at is the switching back and forth thing.

When I went to Kentucky for a week each summer during high school, I would switch to their way of speaking within hours. When I came back, it took a little while to switch back. I noticed this especially when people would ask me about my week in Kentucky and I would slip into that beautiful Appalachian drawl subconsciously in order to tell the stories that took place in that place, in that dialect.

When I get to Spain, how long will it take me to switch from hearing the speedy Spanish flying around me as foreign musical syllables to hearing it as facts and opinions? How hard will it be to pick up the phone, punch in three dozen numbers, and say, "Hello, is this Alissa?" instead of "¿Hola, estás Alisa?" Pero no creo que será un problema muy grande.

But here's where a problem may lie: (Remember how I couldn't talk about Kentucky without slipping into Appalachian speak. Remember how it took me weeks and weeks of story-telling to debrief from my summer at Mt. Rainier. Realize that there are no words to perfectly describe any experience to anyone who didn't experience it themselves. And think about this: I usually describe my summer as FABulous or SOOOper or AWEsome, English words pronounced with a Glacier Dorm accent.) How will I ever describe my experience in Spain to English speakers?