The Office

I heard a great interview with Javier Bardem on Fresh Air from a couple of weeks ago.  I found him super charming because he is SO Spanish and his accent is so Castillian.  If nothing else, I can tell speakers from South America apart from those from the peninsula just by accent (and by attitude, quite honestly).  Anyhow.  He said this thing about acting (and speaking more generally) in English, and his statement summed up exactly how I feel about speaking Spanish here.


"It's a totally different situation.  It's like here, I'm trying to express myself, and share some opinions and be relax, and there's this office in my brain full of people working at the same time that I'm talking to you trying to not be wrong with the intonation, with the words.  So it's very exhausting. If I speak Spanish, that office is closed. There is nobody in the office.  I'm fine by my own."


This statement is so perfect because it IS exhausting.  And it is like having an office of people running around, grabbing files, trying to type your script and hand it to you in the milliseconds it takes to say something.  And it shows perfectly that even with the office up and running (and even with a much more proficient speaker than I am) mistakes happen, and it is very, very hard in your non-native language to "be relax" and to be "fineby my own".


My "office" is further complicating things because it has decided that Spanish and French are basically the same thing, so words from one must be interchangeable with words from the other.  So in addition to not remembering words, and saying crazy things in half-English, I also speak this SpanishFrench mashup that few people (besides my two friends who speak both Spanish and French) understand.  I'm a little worried that not having Spanish classes until September will cause the office to go out of business, but I'm trying to keep it up by going to my intercambio and making my Spanish friends speak to me more and more in Spanish.  My non-Spanish speaking friends also speak more and more in Spanish because we're around other Spanish speakers more and more, which is also good practice.  And, apparently, now I'll be practicing with my nun friend in the morning too (see below).