After working leads to no avail this morning, I decided to go for a walk on the beach in the hopes of lifting my grey mood.<\/p>\n
I met Dale at the entrance to the beach and we chatted for a bit. We might go down to the docks later to check out the cruise ships.<\/p>\n
In a bid (successful, might I add) to avoid vendors, I turned left at the beach and walked towards the other apartments I looked at on Thursday, hoping that Daniel, one of the French guys, would be there so I could touch base and make sure there are no hard feelings about my not taking one of his places.<\/p>\n
He was outside painting, so we gabbed for a bit. He apologized for the suites being so dirty when I saw them. While, yes, that had bothered me, I knew that he was doing renos, so that was not the main reason I wasn’t interested. I came here to get some experience living in a Mexican community, early morning horn blasts and roosters included, and his suites are rather isolated. He was very understanding about that, especially when he learned that I speak Spanish.<\/p>\n
I was beyond ready for lunch by this point (and am learning to move ‘lunch’ to somewhere between 10:30 and 11:30!) so I headed home. On the way there, I got stopped by one of my Mexican neighbours who wanted to introduce himself. I had him repeat and spell his name, but I don’t remember it. \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n
He asked a lot of rather personal questions, but this is such a small place that I know people talk and that anything I didn’t answer he was going to learn from someone else, so I just answered him — renting alone, from Canada, working from home, here for the winter, etc. He was very friendly, but not in a creepy way, and we had a nice chat.<\/p>\n
He said that he is delighted that I speak such lovely Spanish, with a good accent and pace. I replied that I’m enjoying the practise, but know I am making so many errors!<\/p>\n
He then said something no one has said to me here yet (translating loosely): “We are having an interesting conversation in my language. I am understanding you perfectly and you me. When you leave, I’ll remember what we talked about, not the mistakes.<\/em>”<\/p>\n This is exactly my theory of using a foreign language. Use it<\/strong>. You are going to get the odd jerk who will mock you, but, really, you’re the one who gets the laugh as you gain entry into another culture.<\/p>\n I am not going to stop rehashing all the mistakes I make in my interactions with people, because ‘good enough’ isn’t for me, but I’m going to try to stop being embarrassed by errors!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After working leads to no avail this morning, I decided to go for a walk on the beach in the hopes of lifting my grey mood. I met Dale at the entrance to the beach and we chatted for a bit. We might go down to the docks later to check out the cruise ships. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[815,14,635,814,3],"tags":[731],"class_list":["post-1184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mazatlan","category-mexico","category-north-america","category-sinaloa","category-travel","tag-beaches"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}