Luckily, my husbands speaks Spanish fairly well. I don’t think he could have a rousing political debate but he can definitely speak well enough to handle the mundane daily conversations that take place at the bank or grocery store.

Me, not so much. I took 4 years of French in high school. Never a fluent speaker but one with a decent enough French vocabulary back in the day, I now default to French when trying to retrieve a word from the foreign language quadrant of my brain. Defaulting to French when attempting to speak Spanish is not extremely helpful, especially not when it comes to pronunciation. Merde!

Because I am preparing to move to a Spanish speaking country, it made sense to add a once a week private Spanish lesson via Zoom to supplement my 250+ day Duolingo streak. Duolingo has been surprisingly helpful but I am hopful speaking with an actual human will expedite my learning curve.

One of the first questions my delightful Tica teacher asked me was “Cuántos años tiene” – essentially how old are you? My answer “tengo 55 años” – I have 55 years. At least that’s what I thought I said. You see it’s all in the pronunciation. What I meant to say was “Tengo 55 anYos. What I said was “Tengo 55 anOs”…..i have 55 anuses…..

I’m going to be one popular gringo!