Ok, here’s the deal: I, Graham, took one Spanish class like five years ago. And I, Cory, also have only taken 101.01, and I took it a year ago. After being in Nicaragua for four days we went on a homestay.
It started out rough. When we first met Anielka (our host mother), neither of us could remember (or understand ) her name. The first time we met, none of us talked very much. This awkward first encounter inspired Graham and I to come up with some things to talk about with Anielka before our homestay officially began. We prepared some questions but we never ended up using them. This apparently-unnecessary preparation was kind of an indicator of the mood of our homestay experience. We both started the homestay with some amount of preconceived ideas lodged in our brains, thoughts about what we’d eat, how we’d act, how they’d act, what we’d do, etc. We were nervous but ready to get through the experience, ready to have our so-college rich gringo life-changing adventure. In many ways, this is what we had. We got to live with and share experiences with people that changed our lives. We were living in a poorer area in a developing country. We got to ride the public transit bus (really actually some dude who owned a bus and drove where he thought people would be, usually at a breakneck pace through impossibly crowded and narrow streets) through a city we didn’t understand and couldn’t navigate on our own. We laughed and cried and took photos and fell in love with people and a city and a country while speaking a language we didn’t know and learning about ourselves. Our homestay mas o menos fulfilled most of the clichés we had heard about and were anticipating.