Success!

I left my house at around 8:30 this morning and made it to work before 10.  I walked about a mile and a half to the bank and spent the whole time practicing conversation for the bank.  I practiced saying, "The ATM took my card.  A woman at my job told me to come here and get a new one" in Spanish.  I practiced saying, "Also, I wrote the wrong signature on the website and I got locked out of my online account!  Can you unblock it for me?" 

I got there and everyone was pretty busy, but I finally got a guy to help me.  I asked if he (or anyone there) spoke English and told him my Spanish was terrible - but no luck there.  I launched into my spiel about the ATM card and he asked if it was a machine in that place that took my card. And here was the real test.  I had to say things I hadn't practiced.  I told him that the woman at my job had called them, and they told her that they would have the card for me.  So, he went into an office and voila!  My card!  It was the actual card that the ATM had eaten with my signature and everything.  We tested it to make sure it worked and it does.  The guy asked me if I needed the ATM translated to English, but then said my Spanish was good enough he thought I would be okay in Castellano.  So now I do all my transactions in Spanish ... I can always change it later if it's too hard. 

Then we moved on to the internet issue - he fixed everything for me there and we tested the key (though not the signature - so hopefully that works).  I had a good combination of Spanish I had practiced and improv Spanish, but he understood everything I needed and was very helpful.

I honestly feel like if I can do this, I can do almost any face to face interaction.  I think the phone would be way harder, because it's harder to understand in both directions.  Fortunately, they're not huge on phone based customer service here, so I should be able to survive.  Overall, I'm feeling so much better about the whole language barrier/culture shock issue.

I am not very good at patience or at making mistakes, and my time here so far has tested both of those things pretty substantially.  Today demonstrated to me that I need to be more patient with myself (a constant struggle) and to be willing to make mistakes.  In a weird way, if I hadn't totally misunderstood the entire banking system here, I wouldn't have had a chance to practice my Spanish today.  While I was practicing my Spanish, I know I made about 4 billion mistakes, but I survived.  No one yelled at me or laughed at me and the guy understood everything I needed.  So, the next time I need to practice, I'll be a little less scared.  And maybe I'll leave this whole experience actually speaking real Spanish - which was one of my big goals anyhow.

Between this excitement and all of the exciting things getting started at work, today is one of the days when I feel like "I can do this!"  I'm sure I'll have more "What am I DOING here?!?" days, but it's nice to feel like I might be able to succeed!