Merece la pena

My head is so full of Spanish that it feels like it's going to start leaking out my ears.

This weekend The Mister and I met with Rosa and Mauricio for tapas (bull tail meatballs, anyone?)  We also hung out with Pilar and Juan to grab a beer and eat peanuts and popcorn at their favorite American bar.  Then, we celebrated Salva's birthday into the wee hours with a whole raucous crowd of Spaniards (see photo above, shamelessly stolen from Beatriz).

The only English I spoke was to The Mister and occasionally it admittedly came out rather Spanglish-y. Like, "hey, that was a little fuerte, tío."  I am pretty sure that my English skills are cratering in direct proportion to the improvement of my Spanish skills.

Living at the intersection of two languages can be fertile ground for confusion.  My phone's spell check is in Spanish, so occasionally I send my mother texts that read "Haga (supposed to be: haha). Dang my spell checo is in Spanish" (actual text sent today, 16:22  - oh yes, remember 24-hour time?).  I dream in Spanish and in English, and sometimes I dream that all I can speak is a crazy unintelligible mix of the two and nobody can understand me no matter how well I pronounce things.  Then I stop dream-talking and just start eating extra spicy buffalo wings drenched in ranch dressing (hey, it's my dream).

The good news is that each day Spanish gets a little easier to speak, the words come to me a little bit faster, the grammar mistakes a little less egregious.  I once felt that listening to a native Andalucían tell a story was like being drenched all over in water and then asked to separate the drops from each other - that's how impossible it felt to identify each individual word out of the rapid-fire syllables.  But now they make sense mostly, and when they don't I actually know how to identify the unfamiliar part and ask what it is.

It feels like a milagro.