After a week in San Miguel de Allende, a beautiful colonial city in central Mexico (and my usual haunt), I met my brother Jon in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a city of 350,000 people for an intensive Spanish course and homestay with a family.  All Spanish, all the time, no Americans, very little English spoken anywhere. Between the two of us, we did well with our Spanish. Combined it was pretty functional.  Sometimes though, it simply didn’t work.  In a small restaurant we tried our best to ascertain the difference between tacos, tlacoyos, sopes, hacates, and huarachitos.  When all was said and done, we still both ended up with the same dish.  Sometimes we’d find ourselves having one conversation and getting a response to a completely different topic.  We were both super eager to be speaking all the time, yet my laryngitis prevented me from being the prevailing voice, which my ego dearly wanted.  I could barely speak above a low purr, and in the noisy streets not all or I’d start coughing.

 

My teachers at Cemanahuac Language School said that my Spanish was very good (of course they did) and that I speak quite fluidly.  Yet my heart went out to our dear host Irma, her daughter and grandson for having to graciously try to understand us. I could tell when it became just too exhausting.  Her eyes would sort of glaze over and I would just shut up.  In reverse, we too would miss the point of an anecdote of Irma’s. I’d ask Jon in English if he knew what she was talking about and the answer was frequently “nope”.

 

Jon had various inhibitions about Mexico that many Americans have about safety and food and speaking Spanish which he deleted one by one. The night I arrived from San Miguel to meet him (he’d arrived in Cuernavaca a day before me), he watched me eat a huge plate of tacos at a tiny typical restaurant (for about US$2.50 including soup, rice and a drink).  I could tell he was hungry, he drank only beer.  Within a few days he was eating “pasteur” tacos, the kind where they slice the meat off a spit, fearlessly hailing taxis, and speaking Spanish to anyone who would listen.

 

We had a field trip with one of our teachers to the impressive pyramids, Xochicalco (a World Heritage Site), built somewhere about 700 AD. The people of that time had a great understanding of astronomy and had a complex infrastructure to collect and store rainwater.

 

On our two Sunday nights we came across, apparently a regular event, an outdoor street dance with live music, filled with locals dancing and socializing. On Friday evening, we came upon a dance of “danzon”, a traditional social, partner dance of Cuba and Mexico.  That night, there was a line dance of cha cha and I joined in.  One of our teachers was in a musical group called an“estudiantina”. There was a parade of 6 of these groups. Everyone gets in the parade and follows their favorite group down the small side streets. People are out having fun with each other and not always on their devices.  “Hola, Buenos Dias”, “Buenos Tardes”, everyone says it, all the time. Kids are never in strollers.  We didn’t see one.  Everything seems great with less paraphernalia.