Intercambio

Today was my last day of “Easter break” and in more ways than one I am so ready to go back to school. Although my break has been somewhat productive, it has also been really boring and I’ve been pretty lonely. I am ready to be on a schedule again, to have people to talk to and to see my four-year-olds (I really miss them). Most importantly, I am ready to finish my last couple of months in Spain off with a bang. There are less than two-and-a-half months remaining until I return to the United States and I am hoping to absorb as much of Spain (and Europe) as I can before its time for me to depart.

Today I met with a man who I was going to be giving private English lessons to. We had been emailing each other for a couple of months now, and although he already takes English classes, he wanted to have some extra lessons because he has to use his English a lot for business. Fortunately, he lives in the same part of town as I do so we met each other in the town center and decided to sit outside of a café and have a cup of coffee. The day was beautiful.

I didn’t know what type of person to expect. From the emails I had concluded that he was a nice guy but I didn’t know his age, what he looked like or anything else about his personality. Once I met him, I was very impressed. He’s a younger guy (maybe around 30) and he’s very interesting and talkative. I found out that he's from Madrid (thank God a madrileño!) but that he and his wife had moved to Jávea a couple of years ago because they wanted to raise their son in a more peaceful environment (well they picked the right place). We started talking about why he was learning English and about the experiences he’s had with English-speaking people and I also talked about my experiences in Spain. He admitted that he loved my American-English accent (British-English is the norm here) and I was impressed by how easily he could understand it. We had a great conversation.

The guy told me that he had once joined an intercambio group in Jávea but that he had left it because the people were old and the conversations were just too boring. After talking about this, I immediately suggested that we have an intercambio instead of doing the private English lessons. An intercambio is a language exchange. Two people who don’t share native languages meet together to practice speaking in each other’s language. He told me that he would love to do it and asked me if I was sure, and I definitely was. Although I would have been happy to give him private lessons, I figured that this way would be beneficial for both of us. Besides, I wasn’t going to become rich with the amount of money that I was going to charge him for the private lessons anyway.

I am super excited to have an intercambio partner because I feel like it’s something that I’ve been missing out on. Although I speak Spanish everyday to almost everyone that I come in contact with (except my students) I still feel like I need a language partner to bring my Spanish to the next level; especially when it comes to word pronounciation and perfecting the castellano accent. I would like to have someone to critique everything that I say for 30 minutes or so (even though that’s not the way that most intercambios work). Besides, this guy is from Madrid which means that his castellano is more natural and I don’t have to worry about valenciano words creeping into every conversation that we have. Most of the Americans I know living in Spain have intercambios. In the bigger cities, it’s so easy to find people who are interested in having them. In Jávea; however, it’s not so easy because there are no young people.

Both of us agreed to start the intercambios and see each other twice a week if possible. Our conversation today was sort of an intercambio. For the first 45 minutes we spoke in English, and for the last 35 minutes we spoke in Spanish. Afterwards we gave each other suggestions (although there weren’t many) and we talked about what days and times we were going to meet. Our next intercambio is tomorrow and I am pretty excited.