After two weeks of studying Spanish in an immersion program in Mexico, I realized everyone’s going to ask, “So how’s your Spanish?” Let’s just get it out of the way.

It still sucks.

In fact, my Spanish may actually be worse than it was two weeks ago. I blame information overload. I mean, when I say “immersion,” I am not kidding. From the moment I stood at my bedroom door in the morning (taking deep breaths and giving myself a little pep talk before heading out to breakfast) until the moment I shut off the light and crawled into bed (after butchering the language at the dinner table, wading through my flashcards, and finishing my homework), it was nada but Español. I mean, sure, I would occasionally revert to English in a moment of panic or indulge in a delicious, brief conversation with my Californian house-mate in English to discuss complicated ideas, but generally, it was all Spanish, all the time.

I spent every week day at the Livit Immersion Center, started and run by Scott and Maru. They were both so kind, personable, funny, and soooo helpful.

I absolutely loved their wacky dog, Beluga. During breaks, students hung out in the living room, chatted, or played carpetball, which involved rolling billiard balls down the table to knock off the competitor’s balls.

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Here’s our classroom and my teacher, Anna. There were just two other students the first week, and another two joined the second week.

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Students from all the classes ate lunch together outside. Meals were fabulous, prepared by Flora, Maru’s mom.

For housing, I was placed with Javier and Anita, who were unbelievably patient. They would smile and nod as I tossed verb tenses to the wind and added random endings to vocabulary words. They generally spoke as if addressing a toddler, which I appreciated. Sometimes Anita got going on a story, and her pace would speed up, and then I lost the plot. But more often than not, they both tried to use “comprehensible input,” as we say in the world of language acquisition.

Here they are with their son, Antonio, and granddaughter, Maria.

The green house was my home away from home. Comfy bedroom, my own bathroom, authentic Mexican meals, and lots of practice speaking Spanish. I threw down my yoga mat on the roof once, but then it rained every other afternoon.

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Jacinda, another Livit student, stayed in a room upstairs. She was my security blanket for two weeks, and I often found myself looking to her to fill in the gaps when I had a Spanish brain freeze.

Students spent the afternoons with a one-to-one guide, tootling around town and chatting in Spanish. (I’ll write another post with details about that.) The first day, my guide asked if I knew the way home, and I confidently answered, “Por supuesto!” Not true. I got totally lost … for hours. To my embarrassment, the same thing happened the second day. I had opted not to buy a Mexican SIM card for my phone, so I couldn’t use google maps or other internet-based apps outside of wifi. Eventually, I learned my way around town. These piñata shops were on the corner of my street, so I always felt relieved to see them. (Seems a little creepy to beat the crap out of Disney princesses to get candy, no?)

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Just to clarify, I’m not saying I didn’t learn anything. In fact, I learned a LOT. It’s just that I didn’t have time to process what I’ve learned and actually put it in to practice. The classes moved so quickly, and my old brain just couldn’t absorb it like I used to. However, if nothing else, I have a new passion for mastering this #%*@ language. In our years abroad, I’ve studied Turkish, Mandarin, and Lao (not to mention my high school language, German), but all along, I was “saving” Spanish for last. I just had this feeling that Spanish was going to be a breeze, and I would get fluent in no time.

It’s not, and I didn’t. But I haven’t given up.

Regardless of my progress (or lack thereof), I loved this immersion experience, and I absolutely want to do it again. Maybe that’s the most important thing I learned: that I could do it.

Considering how completely shattered – mentally and physically – I was at the end of each day, I’m thinking it would be both powerful and rejuvenating to tack on an immersion experience at the beginning of a travel experience in a Spanish-speaking country (instead of heading straight back to work afterwards). I’m already making plans! More Mexico? Columbia? Ecuador? What’s next?!