Graduation!

We’re very pleased to have completed our two weeks of Spanish classes yesterday. The school does a nice job of reinforcing students’ hard work and accomplishment by conducting a Graduation Ceremony. There were 6 of us who completed our studies yesterday, and at a ceremony in the salon we were each given a Certificate of Achievement and asked to make a brief speech (in Spanish, of course). As usual, a cake and coffee were served, but in this instance they went one step further and added candles to the cake in honor of Cathryn’s birthday (which is actually this Sunday), and the entire staff sang a Spanish birthday song to her, followed by the traditional Happy Birthday song in English. Very thoughtful!

Cathryn is pleased that she can now speak in the past and future tenses, though her speech in those tenses remains halting. Bob feels good about the two weeks in the sense that it provided a good base on which to further build his ability to speak. The biggest challenge for both of us was the large volume of information in a very limited amount of time. Learning the language requires a lot of memorization, and with sometimes hundreds of new words coming at us daily, plus grammar and conjugation of verbs, there simply wasn’t time to absorb it all. But we have our school materials, notes and flashcards and are committed to practicing while we’re home during the holidays as well as when we return to Baja in January. Both Mackenzie and Adrienne have offered to speak Spanish with Cathryn while we’re home (Mackenzie is fairly fluent having lived in Costa Rica with a non-English speaking family for 4 months; Adrienne because Spanish is one of her two majors at University of Colorado). Vamos a ver.

This morning we pull up stakes in La Paz and head to La Ventana, a small fishing village on the beach about an hour down the road. We’ll stay only one night, then head to Los Barriles to visit Jim and Phebe for a few days before flying back to Seattle on Wednesday.