Northern Spain Chapter 15 - Spanish language school in Salamanca
March 18-28 by Joan
Eric and I wanted to study a language sometime in Europe. We had planned on studying 
French in Tours, but it seemed really cold there, so we figured maybe we'd end up studying Spanish. As soon as we crossed the border into Spain we bought some Spanish primers to study up. Then we got to Salamanca and saw a dozen language schools. So we signed up.
Eric was reluctant when I mentioned the idea, but he warmed to it after a few beers. We checked out one school but ended up signing up with a different one, which was a little cheaper (US$125 a person for five days of five-hour classes). We wanted to sign up for two weeks, but because of holidays, there wouldn't be any classes the second week. So we settled for just one week. We were both wondering if we could learn anything in one week.
The lady we signed up with, Coral, talked really fast in Spanish, and made NO attempt to slow down so we could understand. But she did use a lot of body language. She would nod with exaggeration, or smile widely. We walked into her office at 7 p.m. on a Friday, and within an hour, she found us a family to stay with (2200 pesetas, or about US$15 a person a day, including all meals). She even made sure they'd store our bicycles. She wrote down the family's name and phone number, told us to move in with the family on Sunday, and shoved us out the door.
After our first two nights in Salamanca in our nice but pricey hotel, we moved to a campground 4km out of town to save money. We had a great time talking to the bartender there, a guy named Felix. We could mostly understand him. He said he taught computer courses to people who were looking for work. We told him about our plan to study Spanish. He said we must not spend too much time at home, but go out "por las calles" (in the streets) to practice. We told Felix we would come back to visit during the week, but we got so busy, we didn't. We really felt bad that we missed him. Hopefully he will see this web page and know that we really liked meeting him.
So on Sunday, after we put away our tent, we called our new family from the campground.
Eric made the call, to our house mother Nieves. He didn't understand a word she said, but she understood him
when he said we would arrive at 2 p.m. We rode to her house with a mix of dread and anxiety. Who would this family be? What if we didn't like them, or they didn't like us? We figured we could handle anything for a week.
Nieves lives in an apartment building on the north side of town. When we got there, she buzzed us in, and Eric started shuttling all our gear upstairs while I watched the bikes. Whenever Eric came back to get another load, I'd ask him what he had noticed about the family. I was a little scared to go up myself.
It turned out great. Nieves looks like she's in her 60s. She's a large woman, with a loud, loud voice. She's a widow. Her husband died 
when he was 35 years old, in a road construction accident. We didn't understand all she said, but we gathered he had died after getting hit in the head with a large object. Nieves had two daughters at the time. Now the oldest one, Amalia, has two daughters of her own, Rosa, 17, and Marta, 15. Nieves's other daughter, Pilar, is 35 and lives with Nieves.
Technically, only Nieves, Pilar, and a 50ish-year-old guy, Julian (a boarder) lived in the apartment. But every day, Rosa and Marta came to visit. They live with their mom nearby, but they prefer Nieves's food, so they come over every day, during siesta (2 p.m. til around 6 or 7 p.m.) Sometimes if they don't like what Nieves is serving, they turn around and head back to their own house.
Every time Marta walked in the room, the volume always amped up. She had a great time horsing around, making fun of her mother, her sister, her grandmother, and her auntie Pilar. She would just burst in, and start rooting through the cupboards, looking for something that Nieves could cook for her. Nieves didn't mind at all. She totally doted on her granddaughters. Rosa was a live wire, too. She spent a lot of time talking on the phone (sometim
es calling home just to make sure that the menu wasn't better there). We teased her about her daily visits to "Grandma's Restaurant."
Pilar was great, though we didn't see her much, because she worked two jobs, one at night and one in the morning, and we were out all day at school. She spent her time home sleeping siesta, or knitting to relax, or hanging out with her boyfriend Juan Jose (Juanjo for short). She was really warm, and she made an excellent lemon mousse one day.
We had a great time that week, chatting with Nieves and Pilar and the granddaughters. They were all really patient with us when we didn't get their jokes, or we didn't understand simple words.
And we got a great rou
tine going: 8 a.m. wake up; 8:30 eat breakfast (coffee, muffins, biscuit and juice); 8:45 walk to school; 9:00 to 11:15 class; 11:15 to 11:45, coffee break next door at the Irish Rover bar; 11:45 to 2 p.m. more class; 2:30, lunch (biggest meal of the day in Spain); 3 to 9 p.m. siesta, study at the Irish Rover over Murphy Stouts, walk around; 9:30 dinner (small); 10 p.m. study or drink more beer. It was a great life for five weekdays.
School was great. We had three teachers, one who tried really hard to be understood; Coral; and another one named Nurria who we called the Fireball. They taught only in Spanish, although Nurria sometimes tried to explain a few things in English.
The first day we discovered why you can start on any Monday of the week (a typical policy among foreign-student Spanish courses in Salamanca) unless you're a beginner. It turns out the school starts one beginner's class at the start of every month. If you join in the second week, they don't start over for you, you just have to catch up. Since Eric and I joined in the fourth week of the month, we had basically missed three weeks of a four-week crash course.
But luckily, several weeks of studying Spanish grammar and practicing it on the ground had paid off. We knew almost as much as the rest of the class did. We were only behind by two past tenses (we had learned one on our own, whereas as the class had already covered three). So we spent the 
first night catching up. It was brutal and tiresome, but for the rest of the week, we felt pretty much caught up.
It was also great hanging out with the other students a bit. Our class had six: us, a German university student named Dortje; a German university student named Janine; a Norwegian hydro-electrical engineer named Sigve; and a retired German dermatologist named Heidrun. We also got to meet Sigve's girlfriend, Lena (who translates novels from English to Norwegian), and 
their baby, Sievert.
It's hard to measure exactly, but we both felt like we learned a lot. We went from being able to barely understand our family to being able to mostly understand them, especially when they were talking to us (as opposed to talking to each other). We talked a lot to Marta and Rosa about their school and a tattoo Rosa was planning to get (neither her mom or grandmother seemed to mind). We also watched TV.
The only flaw in our plan is that Salamanca is one of our last stops in Spain before Portugal. We plan to be in Portugal for just a few weeks before cycling back into Spain on our way into Italy.
It was hard to leave. We ended up staying the whole weekend after classes, so we got to hang out more with the family. On Saturday, we bought a cake at a bakery for the family's lunch dessert. We spent a lot of time saying our goodbyes on Sunday, and again on Monday.
Lots of other students who came to stay with Nieves gave her gifts from the U.S., like blankets or picture books. Since we didn't come to Nieves directly from home, we couldn't offer her a gift like that. Instead, we gave her some duplicates of the best photos we took of her and her family. When we left on Monday, she said, "If you are ever back in Salamanca, you know where to find us." It was a great feeling to know that we are welcome back.
Next: We meet an actor
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