Sunday, April 28, 2013

In 1974, as a veteran of 2 years of high school Spanish under the tutelage of Mr. Fierros and 2 years of college Spanish, the slavish student of Mr. Campion, I enrolled with Mr. Campion for a college extension course to be taught at Centro Cultural in San Jose, Costa Rica.  Mr. Campion organized these trips every summer and he taught the classes for a few hours a day in San Jose leaving the students to learn the language and culture the rest of the time. This was by far, the best part of the language learning experience. We were supposed to live with a family there, but they were short a family and I wound up in a pension which was OK, but not as intimate an experience as living with a family might have been.  The trip, in all, was inexpensive (due to tuition and expense grants) and irreplaceable as a first chance to be away from home and live in a foreign environment.  Some of the students  flew to Costa Rica, but trying to trim costs as much as possible, I rode most of the 3000 miles in the shell camper of an old Chevvy pickup.  Gonzalo Morales had no need of a Spanish speaking experience, but he was as eligible as any of us for financial aid, so as a 40+ year old man, he enrolled in the course and his master plan was to sell the truck and a trailer-load of junk in Costa Rica and make some money.  Myself, Lorna Griffin, Sheila Moore  and Pearl Zertuche paid Gonzalo for passage, and he drove the truck the length of Mexico and through Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.  Lorna, Sheila and I were the teenagers of the group.  Pearl was another middle-aged native speaker on vacation.  Because Pearl would get carsick, we three spent most of the time in the un-airconditioned shell  camper crossing the deserts of Mexico looking out of the tiny windows on the sides and listening to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.  In Tegucigalpa, Honduras Gonzalo, who had failed to get a passport and was  bluffing his way through the borders got hung up by immigration and had to go to the Embassy to get an emergency passport, which took a few days.  Because the rest of us had to get to San Jose to start the school, he had to buy us tickets on the Tica Bus line and we rode the rest of the way through Nicaragua and Costa Rica in style, finally met by Mr. Campion who settled us in to our accommodations.  Sheila’s family had teenagers about our age and Lorna had a “brother” a bit younger, but we met some friends at local dance clubs and had a great experience.  I became an Orange Crush drinker while my compatriots learned to drink cerveza.  Most of my meals were taken with the boarders in the pension, mostly early 20’s men who were working or going to school.  They didn’t speak much English and my conversational Spanish was embryonic, so interactions were a little stilted.  I did speak quite a bit with Daisy, one of the maids, and by the end of the summer felt like I could survive in a Spanish-speaking country.  When our summer ended and it was time to head home,  Sheila, Lorna and I turned north on Tica Bus as far as it went, and then on a Mexican bus line to where we could start a journey by train.  It was really an ideal traveling arrangement because the girls could travel unmolested because they were with me, and strangers were very kind and generous because I was with them.  Traveling in Mexico took some persistence.  I recall buying train tickets at the main train depot in Mexico City where ticket windows in the large round room would open, seemingly at random and would sell a limited number of tickets for a particular train.  This was B.C. (Before Computer) and is probably a more sane process now, but then getting a ticket for the train you wanted was a challenge.  We persevered and finally got to Nogales where my Mom and Dad picked us up in their pickup-camper and drove us back to Phoenix.  A few short days later I loaded my necessities into my car and headed off for college at University of Arizona in Tucson, but that’s another story.  I took 2 more years of Spanish at U of A which was a much better experience with an improved ear and tongue for the language.