Almost four weeks after arrival. This post I shall call: I am sorry for not keeping up. I have been busy learning a foreign language and eating gallo

To start off: I absolutely can not believe that it is March. Time flies when you are living and breathing a different language. Some things about it though, I can not say I expected.

Being surrounded by Spanish (and no, before anyone asks, I am nowhere near fluent yet. At this point, I think I will be happy if I can make it through a conversation with my tico brother without having to ask him to repeat something less than seven times), I have noticed a few funny things about living and functioning in the presence of two languages.

One is when phrases in Spanish are directly translated from English, as in, the English language has such a huge impact on all other cultures via movies and music and other mass media that the exact same words are used to explain the same thing. For example: rat tail in Spanish is cola de rata—a direct translation. Call me crazy, but I get a big kick out of this. Something closely related is when they don’t even bother to translate an English phrase. For example, jeans are jeans in Spanish, and I read an article the other day in La Nacion talking about IPhone “apps.” I don’t know whether I should be afraid that Mac will eventually take over the entire world, or proud that a business from my home country is being discussed in my Central American home. Regardless, it is pretty entertaining to listen to a native Spanish speaker talking about “apps” with an accent.

I have also found it really interesting that there are so few words for some things in Spanish. Or to put it more accurately, that only a few words are actually used as common phrases. Just about anything here can appropriately be called “bonito,” which in a Spanish-English dictionary means “beautiful,” but which is actually used in lieu of other words to describe things that are cool, romantic, neat, nice, great, awesome, wonderful and sweet. For example, a tica student helper on our tour of campus pointed out some bars to us that were bonito, my prima tica asked me if the last movie I saw was bonito, and my papa tico’s reaction when I told him the story of how my parents had met was “Ay, que bonito” (That is the other thing about the word “bonito”—both men and women use it an equal amount, which is always a little funny for me to hear given the fact that I always directly translate it in my head as “beautiful” Few American men use this word unless they have a feminine objective in mind). At first, this excessive use of “bonito” got on my nerves. Being a journalism major, I wanted to tell some of these ticos to go look in a thesaurus. But then I realized, maybe these people call things beautiful so often because that is what they are. How simple and how--well, beautiful--to have found one word that can portray exactly what you think of it.

On the flip side, there are other Spanish words that exist in abundance to describe what we only have one word for in English. The most obvious and most poignant example is the English word for love. Spanish speakers have at least four different words for love, each one to describe a more specific type. There is the love of things and activities (encantarse), the love between friends and sometimes family and sometimes a food or activity that you are especially fond of (amar), the love between family and spouses (querer) and of course, a more sexual love between partners (desear). How poetic to distinguish the many facets of love.

I think I might love Spanish.