House Rental & Spanish Lessons

After figuring out that $7/night/person was too expensive for our incredibly extravagant budget, I had the "bright" idea of renting a house for a week. After meeting a smooth English-speaking realtor, he introduced us to Marcella, the girl in charge of rentals. With almost no Spanish, you would be amazed how easy it is to rent a house using only hand & arm motions. Really, it only took 2 hrs of "conversation" that brought back nostalgic memories of jumping jacks during highschool phys ed. Anyway, the selling points of our new casa were already highlighted by Rafer in a previous post.

Now that we had a house, we were basically locals, so all we needed was the ability to communicate better. We set out in search of Spanish lessons. After checking out three so-called Spanish schools, it turned out that Marcella just so happened to have a cute friend who taught Spanish. Her friend also had at least two kids. As our neighbour Daniel explained to us:

"Two niños by age 20, four niños by age 30."

He also followed the rule, his first child born when he was 15 years old, and he now had four children, being a ripe 31 years old.

Our Spanish lessons were a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, they forced us to actually spend our time speaking in Español, but on the other hand, they were relatively expensive ($3/hr/person) and not very well organized. By the end of our first week we had already figured out that it was much cheaper to buy alcohol and food for locals and spend days conversing, drinking, going to the beach, fishing, bars & clubs, and basketball games that were cancelled due to rain. The last straw was when the mango tree attempted to murder us, assaulting Rafer's shoulder with mangos from its highest branch. Thus ended our formal Spanish education.

Dan.

PS: This was still in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua.