Wow! I can't believe we leave in a little more than 3 weeks! To be honest, this trip has been a long time coming. It's something we kinda talked about after our big RTW trip, because Central and South America just didn't fit our plans. We felt we had to make it separate trip. But when? and, for how long? Of course, we had just gotten back and had to re-start our lives here in the US. Then, there's the price of a ticket ($1000+ per person, round trip) and for that $$, we'd want to stay for at least a month. When's a good time? What about work? Should we learn Spanish? Is there time for that?
Anyway, late 2015 I think the idea of traveling to South America was brought up. Now that I was retired and Froody's schedule was becoming a little more flexible, it seemed the timing was right. Froody had just started with his new company, but felt pretty confident that we could take a longer trip, like a couple of months. Perfect! That gave us a year to pick up as much Spanish as we could.
We both have been using Duolingo to help us with the language. For Froody, it's all new but for me, it's been a great review of 6 years of Spanish (all through Jr. and High Schools). I like how well it's "chunked", the pronunciation on the site, and that they have seriously thought out when to review. I think the most helpful part, to me, has been the microphone, meaning that you can actually talk to the computer and it listens to you. Does it help with accents? Somewhat, but it mainly gives me a chance to actually use the language.
Another way I've been preparing for my 2-3 months of being immersed in Spanish is my novela (Spanish soap opera), La Reina del Sur. Wow! In the past, I've seen a couple of minutes of an episode or two of some novela or other, and they seemed a bit boring. But La Reina is pretty awesome. Apparently, Telemundo (the TV station) spent a lot of money and took a big risk with this show as it's really different from the traditional novela. It helps that the main character, Teresa Mendoza, is not only attractive, but muscular and fit and vulnerable yet strong. Of course, like all good soap operas, there's lots of attractive women and men on the show, some skin, sex, explosions, etc. And, because she spends time around drug lords, pimps, and other shady characters, the vocabulary is nothing like what Duolingo would ever teach me! Ha! I've learned a few cuss-words and other bad words. Froody says if we every come across a drug lord on our trip, he'll have me do the talking. XD
Naturally, I can't follow the program 100%. But what's cool is that there are characters from all over the Spanish-speaking world: Mexico, Spain, North Africa, Colombia, etc. So, I kinda get a glimpse into what Spanish sounds like spoken by different people. Yeah, everyone talks way to fast for me to really get it (I rely heavily on the Spanish sub-titles, yet even they fly by), but the Spaniards and Arabs speak so fast, that the sub-titles show dropped syllables and are at times just flashed up and I can't even make out a single word before the next one is up!
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