After our trip last year, I decided to learn some Spanish to enrich my next experience in Ecuador. I got along fine without any knowledge of Spanish, but a least half of the trip was with bilingual gudes.
This year I started basic conversational Spanish lessons through Coastal Carolina's OLLI program, about a month before leaving on this trip. We have a great teacher in Luz Greene, and very good resource matrials. I can already tell a difference from last year, but I've got a long way to go.
Mary had 6 years of Spanish in high school and college; she says that much of it is coming back to her.
Today we had lunch in a restaurant that I remembered from last year. The menu was entirely in Spanish (no English anywhere), and only one of the waiters spoke English. And we had left our handy dictionary at the hotel. We struggled a bit but still had a good lunch. All I had to remember was "Pilsner" (the local tasty beer) and I was happy. Our biggest problem was figuring out what "glass" was, as in "glass of wine." It's "copa."
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