I’ve been avoiding this.
Not consciously. But yeah—consciously.
The full conversation with a local. No training wheels. No “sorry, I don’t understand” every other sentence. Just a normal, flowing, grown-up conversation in Spanish.
Three and a half weeks into this course, and I figured it was time.
I didn’t plan it. I was just at a laundromat. There’s one near my hotel that’s small, quiet, no tourists. The machines are older than I am. You can smell detergent and maybe regret.
This guy walks in. Mid-60s, salt-and-pepper hair, looks like he’s been folding clothes for decades. He nods at me. I nod back. Classic laundry etiquette.
Then he says something. In Spanish. And I understand all of it.
“Hace calor hoy, ¿no?”
Hot today, right?
I nod again. Too hard. Too eager. “Sí, mucho.”
We’re doing this.
He throws in another sentence. Something about how Barcelona gets worse every year. More people, more noise. He’s lived here since the 80s, he says. I catch all of that. I’m not even sweating yet.
So I try. I reply. Something about how I’m here for a Spanish course, how I’m from California, how the weather’s not so different but the buildings are older and the bread is better.
He laughs. Not at me—at something I said. Not sure what, exactly, but I’ll take it. I laugh too. Safely.
And then… the wheel comes off.
He asks a question. It’s fast. He’s warmed up now. This is conversation, not a classroom. He’s not slowing down for me anymore.
I don’t get a single word.
Not one.
I smile. I say, “¿Puedes repetir?”
He repeats it. Slower.
Still nothing. My brain does the thing where it plays white noise and panic simultaneously.
I apologize. I say something clunky about not understanding, still learning, it’s difficult, ha-ha, sorry.
He switches topics. Asks where I’m staying. I answer. He asks what I think of the neighborhood. I understand half. I try anyway. My tenses are chaos. Articles are missing. It’s like someone dropped my sentence in a blender and hit “pulse.”
But we keep going.
And then the buzzer on his machine goes off, and he nods, says “Buena suerte con el curso,” and leaves.
Just like that.
Afterwards I sit there, socks spinning behind glass, heart rate like I just sprinted a mile. My mouth is dry. My head feels like it’s been microwaved.
But also?
I’m weirdly… proud.
Not because it was good. It wasn’t. Not because I held my own. I didn’t.
Because I did it. I didn’t run. I didn’t switch to English. I stayed in the room.
And that? That’s the real shift. Not the grammar. Not the vocab lists. The staying.
I walked out of that laundromat like I’d just passed some kind of invisible test.
Still not fluent. Still mostly lost. But not invisible anymore. Not hiding.
Things I learned today:
– A nod can be both “yes” and “please stop talking, I’m panicking.”
– Most people don’t care if your grammar’s trash if you’re trying.
– Small talk is way scarier than I thought.
– If you get stuck, just say something about the weather. It always works.
– “Buena suerte” hits different when it’s said like someone means it.
Next post: I try to explain my life in Spanish to the class. Could be inspiring. Could be total collapse. Either way, you’ll hear about it.