However, when we returned to Madrid a month later and took the visa to the proper office, we faced the depressingly predictable bad result. There was a line, the wait was forever, the kids and I finally presented ourselves to the stern government official—and it turned out that our temporary visa had expired. I was furious, but I also felt like an idiot. The Spanish bureaucracy was complex and hard to navigate, all right, but I had failed to notice the expiration date written right there on my visa. It wasn’t even Spain’s fault—it was mine!
It was the beginning of a new school year, and by now we felt like old hands. There were new families arriving, new teachers for the kids, and a new language school for me. I did enroll at International House, first in a five-day intensive course to get me into the swing of speaking Spanish again, and then in a regular twice-a-week class. I loved the teaching method they used—each lesson was prepared by the teacher to address a point of grammar or usage, with lots of speaking practice for the students and a good deal of fun built in as well. To teach the subjunctive, for example, we pretended we were nosy parents advising our college-student children how to prepare for exams. “I suggest you study for four hours,” “I insist you stay home tonight and work,” etc. Virgilio, who was my teacher for most of the year, gave a great lesson on ethnic stereotypes within Spain—Catalans were considered sneaky, for example, and Galicians were thought to be cheapskates. My classmates were fun, too—there were always a few Brits who made their living teaching English, and we had exchange students from Japan, wives of Volkswagen executives from Germany, and an American woman married to a Spaniard who spoke to her husband only in English.
I also arranged an intercambio, an exchange, for myself. This was common in the language schools—they always recommended that you find a Spanish speaker who wanted to learn English and agree to a regular time to get together, speaking Spanish half the time and English half the time, so you could help each other. I put a notice in the American School’s newsletter saying that I was looking for someone who would like to do an intercambio with me.
The result of that little ad was that I met Tatiana Vásquez, a pretty blond from Mexico, whose older son was in first grade at the school. Tatiana had come to Madrid when her husband, Javier, finished dental school in Mexico and decided to do an internship in Spain. She had two little boys, Javi and Estéfano, who were six and three.
When we met in the school’s cafeteria, I noticed that Tatiana’s English was much better than my Spanish. “I went to the American School in Guadalajara, and my English used to be really good,” she said, “but I haven’t used it for years, and I don’t remember very much.”
“Oh, I think you remember plenty,” I said, admiring her fluency. “I don’t think you need this practice as much as I do.” We agreed to spend an hour together each week, speaking first in English, then in Spanish. Once we started talking, though, matters went quickly beyond language skills to personal exchanges. Tati was warm and caring—she was a psychologist—and she listened to my concerns about my dad’s health with great sympathy. And she told me how she worried about Javi—his teacher said he had some learning delays, and she didn’t know what she should be doing about that.
Her English really was wonderful—all I ever had to correct was a word choice here or there—and she gave me good advice on my Spanish. “Da su tiempo a cada vocal,” she insisted over and over—give each vowel its time. She complained that I spoke too fast and ran my words together. “Spanish speakers don’t do that,” she said. And we laughed together when she told me how amazed she was to notice that she was using the word vale to mean “okay,” just as the Spaniards did. “I never thought I’d end up saying that!” she said. “It sounded so bad to me when I first came here! In Mexico we just say okei, like you gringos.” We became good friends.
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