We owe Lois Viscoli, a fellow student in our Spanish class in Santa Fe, a great debt for setting us on this path. When the six students in our class were sharing our reasons for studying Spanish, Lois told us that she was heading to Cuba for the third time, and this time wanted to interact more with the people there. Cuba! Three times! Wow!
Lois's glowing and entertaining stories about Cuba were so intriguing that, within a week, we had signed on for the upcoming December 2013 tour that she herself was taking. Sponsored by the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market, the trip would bring the opportunity to meet Cuban artists in person and to buy their art. Although at that time our own government prohibited bringing Cuban rum and cigars to the USA, importing Cuban art was A-OK. And what fun for our very first "passport" trip to be to a quasi-forbidden Communist country.
Cuba was magical. Just trying to talk Spanish with the friendly Cubans we encountered greatly enhanced our experiences. Cubans love talking to Americans, especially to those who attempt to speak Spanish. We were hooked.
So much so that we planned a month-long immersion in Mexico, intending to go to Guanajuato. But before we made much progress planning that trip, we learned of a similar immersion experience in Salamanca, Spain, scheduled for the fall of 2014. Why not? Our close neighbor Mexico could wait. The well-travelled Lois had told us that next to Cuba, her favorite place to visit was Spain. She had steered us right about Cuba. So Spain it was.
Spain exceeded all expectations, even what fantasies we indulged beforehand. Within a few weeks after returning home, we were planning to go back, in the fall of 2015. Instead of Salamanca, though, the sponsors of our immersion had moved the experience to Madrid. The chance to be in a new city in Spain, for an extended time, was irresistible.
The trip that morphed
After we enrolled in the Madrid program, daydreaming about a return trip to Spain occupied more and more of our thinking. We asked, "What do we have going on in our lives, now that Dave is retired, that imposes a limit on time away to only one month? Why not stay longer and see more?" Asi que, we added southern Spain to the itinerary.
Subsequently, in February, we took an out-of-town friend to see Tumacacori Mission, between Tucson and Nogales. It so happened that two staff from the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum were doing a formal presentation there about a trip they would be leading to Spain in the fall of 2015. This educational trip to eastern Spain, sponsored by the Museum, would study the Spanish roots of the agriculture and culture of the American Southwest. That trip would end in Madrid, the exact day our month-long immersion there would begin. So Mary Jane, a person strongly influenced by "signs," reasoned that the encounter with the Desert Museum staff was not totally by chance. In short order, we added that trip to our lengthening itinerary.
For all that, didn’t it just make for ultimate good sense to visit the Basque Country before joining with the Desert Museum folks in Barcelona? And, of course, then, Paris on the way to the Basque Country, since that’s where the plane had to go anyway? Thus, four weeks became nine weeks.
An evolving passion for Spanish
"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart" - Nelson MandelaWaiting for our first Spain trip last year, we continued studying Spanish casually, using the Pimsleur method. It's great for gaining facility with pronunciation and comfort with speaking, but doesn't offer much help understanding Spanish grammar. In fact, it hardly mentions grammar. So when we got to Spain, we had a certain level of unjustified confidence, unaware as we were that there's more than one past tense, and that there's a "mood" the Spanish really love called the Subjunctive.
It's as well we didn't know these and other finer points. Our ignorance made us pretty uninhibited! Absence of inhibition, fueled by a little Spanish wine, enabled us to connect with locals, a connection that would have been impossible without at least approximately speaking Spanish.
We met Eugenio through his charming dog Chico, an Ibizan hound who is a dead ringer for our dog Toby. Eugenio is a retired insurance agent, who spends hours each day walking Chico in old town Salamanca. When we would run into him, he would always offer to show and tell us about new sites -- our own congenial tour guide.
Luis Méndez demonstrated his historical filigree jewelry-making process, to our Spanish class, at his gallery in Salamanca. We quickly connected when we learned he exhibits at the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market, and that he is a good friend with our guide to Cuba, Peggy Gaustad. Luis, who like Eugenio speaks no English, invited us to lunch one day. "Lunch" was a four hour tour of old town Salamanca and a string of tapas bars. We met up with Luis again this summer, in Santa Fe at the Folk Art Market.
Dave still cherishes a brief encounter in Zamora, chatting with an elderly man on the square outside the cathedral there. Mary Jane remembers fondly the nice Spanish lady at the Río Douro Natural Park, just over the border into Portugal, who told MJ that she thinks MJ looks pretty good, given MJ's age and the fact that she "hasn't had any work done." In Salamanca the waitress María asked us to adopt her, and we met and chatted up another waitress who looks just like Drew Barrymore. And then there were all the locals we met who came to our hotel bar to watch fútbol, and the Spanish Facebook friends MJ acquired.
Limited to English, we would have missed out on these enriching encounters. So we determined to dedicate the year before our return to Spain to becoming much more proficient in Spanish. We found a terrific and delightful teacher in Tucson, Aida Borom. We've studied with her privately twice a week. Our classes include lots of conversation, correcting sentences which we translate from English into Spanish, and reviewing the original essays we write for each class. Aida is originally from Argentina, and her mother is from Spain. So she's been able to teach us all about that uniquely Spanish person, "Vosotros."
We spend several hours most days doing our class assignments and studying grammar on our own, and we listen to Spanish news and podcasts. We completed all the Pimsleur lessons. Now we’ve moved on to watching movies and TV shows in Spanish. (We still need those subtitles, though. Of course, these days we need them for English shows, too.)
We’re eager to see how we fare in Spain this year, armed with all our study and practice! Thank you, Lois (rest in peace), for starting us on this path. We miss you and think of you on all our travels!
Gratitude
We worked hard for a long time, finally to get to the point in our lives where we can make a trip like this. Still, we recognize how lucky we are to live in a place and time that enables us to realize our dreams. We never take good fortune for granted. In fact, we are more aware of it the more we travel. Moreover, we are grateful that we each have, in the other, a partner who shares our dreams and with whom we can enjoy living them.
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| Chico |
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| An encounter in Zamora |
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