camera obscura

In a manner of speaking

Tonight I was chatting with my dear friend about her recent study abroad experience in Madrid, Spain. I asked her to describe her experience in three words and she said: difficult, amazing and life-changing. She lived with an elderly Spanish woman who was a kind hostess who liked to make whatever she wanted for dinner, despite Posah's gluten-free dietary needs. She managed to go on a date with a madrileno and enjoyed traveling around through the countryside of Spain where she learned to embrace the drastically different cultures and languages that reside with in the land. It was in the breath-takingly beautiful Andalucia where she found herslf and was inspired to right a Spanish sonnet about the sun and the moon. It was in Segovia that she began to understand how differently she expressed her self in the three languages that she is fluent in: French, English and Spanish. In English she expresses herslf intellectually and deeply and in Spanish she finds that she expresses elemental feelings, some inexpressable in English with the lack of emmotional words the language has in comparison to Spanish. She did not quite describe her connection with French but I percieve that she may be able to express passionate feelings--with which the French have in abundatance.

It got me thinking about my personality in regards to the language I speak. SInce I am not a native Spanish speaker deep concepts seem a bit harder for me to describe. When discussing God and religion with my novio I had a hard time conveying my factual reasons for my faith and relied on my emmotions. Spanish is filled with descriptive adjectives and metaphors that the mother language lacks. And discovering this spurs my desire to learn to speak other languages so as to be able to communicate with that many more people in a ameaningful way. Because I had a good grasp of castellano in Buenos Aires, I was able to bridge the language and culture gap and relate to an amazing people.

Castellano, te amo con mis corazon entera, adelante me voy, frances.