Then I moved to Mexico for five years and endeavored to learn Spanish. I think it's a much easier language to learn, perhaps the easiest. But I was living with mostly U.S. and Canadian ex-pats and most of them didn't bother learning Spanish. They just raised their voices as they continued speaking English, apparently surmising that volume would make them understood.
I had my vocabulary of a couple of hundred words which enabled me to fill my car with gasoline, order in restaurants and shop in grocery stores. But if, for example, the water heater broke - I was lost again. Once something did happen to our water system and a couple of big guys from the city were about to turn off our supply because we were "using too much". I made them understand that they should wait a moment while I ran down the block to a neighborhood market and return with my Mexican friend who was fluent in both English and Spanish.
All of this confessional venting comes about because I was looking at the title of this post: WEDNESDAY. Now think about it. Shouldn't that be spelled Whensday? Or even Wensday? That's how we pronounce it. Not Wed-ness-day.
And don't even get me started on FEBRUARY!
