Progress

As the end of my trip is but a week and a half away, and one of my main goals was to make big strides with my Spanissh, Ive been doing a lot of reflecting over the past few days.

Ive had my ups and downs over the past two months, but yesterday was definitely an "up" day.

Henry is back in the United States now, and he and I spoke yesterday morning through webcam. He has been really great about making it a point to speak only in Spanish when we talk, and yesterday we had an entire phone conversation in Spanish. (He may speak a bit slower when hes talking to me, but I wont tell if you wont.)

In the afternoon, I took a metro ride into the center of Medellin. After walking around for a while and soaking in the city atmosphere, I decided that it might be a good language exercise to go see a movie in Spanish. Javier had told me that the majority of movies here are in English with Spanish subtitles, which makes sense since most of the big movies are coming from Hollywood. I figured that as long as I could associate the English word with the corresponding Spanish word it would be beneficial.

After asking around for cinemas in the area I was directed to the Colombian-American center, where a number of independent films were being shown. I arrived at 4:35, and the film "La caja de Pandora" (Pandoras Box) had just started at 4:30. So I skipped in right as the opening credits were rolling.

Looking back, it was a fairly large oversight, but what I hadnt thought of at the time was that while a majority of mainstream movies do in fact come from the U.S.--which is why many movies arrive here in English--independent films are not restricted as such.

The movie turned out to be in Russian--or the like--with Spanish subtitles.

Id be lying if I said I understood every word because they were shooting across the bottom of the screen pretty fast, but I can definitely say that I understood a majority of each conversation, and what I lacked in vocabulary didnt interfere with my understanding of the movie.

My second victory of the day.

Then, when I returned home for the evening and hopped on facebook, I found myself engaged in two chat conversations--one with Javier, and one with Santiago, a student I met from Bogota --both in Spanish.

Final tally for the day:

1 phone conversation

1 movie

2 chat conversations

Today, I start my first of two days of Salsa lessons--a big step towards completing the assimilation process.