New friends

I've said it here before, I think, but it bears repeating: I'm rich in friendship. When I was in my 20's it seemed difficult to make new friends, but now in my 40s it seems to be a regular occurrence in my life.

This  morning I'm meeting a new friend for coffee, a woman named Norma. I met her at the school last week when she stopped in to pick up her son early for an appointment. She's from Mexico and her English is still rudimentary, so she brought her older son along to help translate. Since I'm trying to learn Spanish, I made an effort to speak it as much as I could, and she tried to hold up her end in English. (The older brother finally grinned and stepped aside and left us to it). Norma speaks English about as well I speak Spanish, which isn't saying a lot (ha!) but we had fun. Before she left she got my whole name, and when I left work that afternoon she had sent me a Facebook friend request. Which led to an hour of messaging back and forth and we've decided to get to know each other and help each other with our language lessons! How cool is that?

I have two Starbucks gift cards so I suggested meet up there this morning and get free drinks. (I don't care for Starbucks, but I appreciate the gift cards which were end-of-the-year presents from a couple of students and their families). Besides learning a new language, we discovered that we share a love of cooking, and last night Norma sent me a picture of the dinner she was making and this sentence, "You will learn to speak Spanish and you will learn to cook Mexican!" which made me laugh right out loud.

I'm looking forward to this new friend! Lucky me.

This is how you grow

Despite the fact that I've lived my whole life within 30 miles of where I was born, I've always been really interested in and curious about people from all over the world. I'm grateful to be an adult at this point in time, where the world is literally at your fingertips via the internet and people can share information instantly. Discovering blogs and blogging has been a real delight, as it gives me a chance to indulge my love of learning about everyday life in far flung places. I've also been working to learn Spanish this year, and in my clumsy attempts to practice speaking it I've met and gotten to know some really interesting people.

And speaking of meeting interesting people, and clumsy attempts at speaking Spanish.....

A nice older couple visit the bookstore where I work almost every evening to sip espressos and share a dessert. They're distinguished looking people, the owners of one of the nicer jewelry stores in the area, and originally from Colombia. The husband has a big, warm smile and is unfailingly friendly and courteous, so I finally got up the nerve to tell him I'm trying to learn Spanish. His response was "Wonderful! Don't be ashamed to practice or afraid of making mistakes. It's how you learn!" Which is true, and so we began practicing a little whenever he comes in. One subject I can usually do really well talking about in Spanish is my dogs, so I decided to tell him about Ginger and George. It was going fairly well at first, but I tend to get nervous and a bit tongue tied after awhile when a native speaker is listening. So after going on about how wild George is, and how much extra energy he has, I said, (or meant to say) "We walk our dogs every day." The man looked at me funny for a minute, and then started laughing. And I, totally clueless, kept saying "What? What did I say?" while he laughed and laughed.

Unfortunately for me, the verb for "we walk" and "we eat" sound similar. I had just told this nice gentleman that we eat our dogs everyday! Nice!

Yo no come mis perros!