Surprises

Well, turns out all of my crabbiness on Monday was mostly unfounded.  I got back and have been mostly fine.  Largely because it feels like I never left, which is weird.  Since I had similar weird feelings of never having left in Chicago.  So it's like I have two parallel lives that are fine by themselves, but when they meet each other it's very dramatic.  Very weird.  Maybe more on that later.

So that was a surprise.

A bigger surprise was that suddenly way more of my life is happening in Spanish.  People are talking to me at bus stops. The administration at work has suddenly decided to communicate with me in Spanish.  I ran into my Basque teacher who communicated with me only in Spanish and Basque (that language is going to make me crazy).  I'm happy about this change, but I also feel like I really need to make the next jump up in Spanish.  My class has stagnated a little bit and I need to figure out the next thing to make that jump up.  Part of my plan is to go to a weekly language exchange group in addition to my current one-on-one language exchange.  Another part is to do some self study of grammar so I can spend more of my Spanish class actually practicing some creativity with the language instead of thinking about how to conjugate a certain verb in the past subjunctive.  I'm hoping that heading back to Basque class will also help my Spanish leap to the next stage.  I can definitely communicate almost everything I want to know, but I still have to work around a lot of vocabulary I don't know and make tons of grammar mistakes.  I confuse the verb tenses a lot, but am making many few mistakes in my writing than I was even a few weeks ago.  That said, as you all know I am really (really) impatient about everything, so I need to figure out how to get moving on this again.  I'm also reading Harry Potter in Spanish, which is a lot of fun ... and not as hard as I thought it would be.  It's funny because after about six months of full-time Spanish, I'm about at the point I was after 4+ years of French.

Anyhow, life is pretty good here in Donostia.  Happy thoughts are still welcome regarding the job market (especially since Peter and I have a new bargain where I am allowed 30 minutes of worrying a day, so I'll need you guys working overtime for me)!