April 30, 2007

It was at the Escuela Mexicana where we practiced our Spanish, cooked, danced, made friends, and generally made merry for three weeks.

We had both taken a semester-long night school course before leaving home, but the distractions of learning a new language in large classes after a full work day proved too much, and we had little to show for our efforts.

Adrienne had found the Escuela by chance while surfing the Net and we had enrolled knowing almost nothing about it.

(Once we were there we learned that the other main Spanish schools in Guanajuato are Academia Falcon, Instituto Miguel Cervantes and don Quijote.)

The three-story, yellow-painted building in which the school is housed sits on sleepy Callejon Potrero about a two-minute walk from the Jardin de la Union. On the main floor there is a tiny cafe with rose coloured walls dotted with bright paintings, a double-high beamed ceiling and a few tables. We climb to the roof to get to some of our classrooms, some inside and others out.

Claudia, Rolando, Memo and the other teachers are young, intelligent and fun - Memo reminds us of Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna's mischevious characters in Y Tu Mama Tambien - and the classes are small. During the second week it was just the two of us in each of our five courses. Our teachers are patient as we pepper them with questions about what we have discovered about Mexico the past three months.

While the grammar and conversation courses were important, the cooking and dancing classes were the highlights.

In our cooking classes with Anna - again, just the two of us - we made Tinga (chicken stew, sort of), Sopes (soft tacos meet tostados) and Albondignes (meatballs stuffed with hardboiled eggs in a tangy red sauce). All delicious and all easily replicated once we get home.

The dance moves we learned, on the other hand, are probably not so easily replicated once we get home. While Adrienne took the "feel-the-music" approach, I held to the "dancing-is-a-system-to-be-learned" approach, and as a couple we met with marginal success. On her own Adrienne was of course a star - she continues to relish in the fact that Miguel, our suave dance instructor, told her she was a "natural".

We had expected to meet more young'ish travelers on the way down but instead found the campsites to be occupied by the RV/snowbird crowds, or empty. Thus, along with filling our brains and bellies, the school satiated our appetite for social interaction as we met a fascinating cast of gringo characters:

-Annie and Robert, a couple in their 50s or 60s who have retired in Todas Santos on the Baja - she a beautiful and fashionable poet, he a ruggedly handsome race-car driver with clear blue-eyes and a shock of grey hair;
-Rich, a 30-something pediatrician in Colorado who travels with couples when they head oversees to adopt children;
-Javier, who had owned a moving company in San Francisco for 19 years but gave it up to pursue painting full time in Guanajuato; and
-Shari who, after 25 years, left her oil and gas legal practice in Denver to try and join the foreign service.

Although we both received a certificate that stated we had reached an "intermediate" level of Spanish, three weeks was not enough to leave us any where close to being fluent. However, our Spanish arsenal now includes over 60 verbs and we have a working knowledge of the past tense.

The future tense will have to wait until our return visit.

Key Facts & Figures:

-Escuela Mexicana registration fee: $35/person
-Escuela Mexicana classes (5 hours of class per day): $100/person per week.