Its hot. I need a beer, and fast. Or in this case, two.
“Dos cervezas, por favor” is about all the Spanish I know, despite 3 years of Spanish in high school and a few halfhearted attempts to learn it later in life. So what better place to begin our world travels than Latin America?
Complete inability to communicate with anybody about anything is definitely an opportunity for adventure. Need a bus ticket? Sorry. How about a restroom? No luck. Where are we going to sleep tonight? Hey, do you speak English?!
To improve upon this situation we have enrolled in a full immersion language school for 4 weeks. For the month of January, we will be trying to speak Spanish for about 5 hours a day at in the town of San Miguel de Allende, a couple hours bus ride north of Mexico City. The town has a large expat community and a huge art scene, so we’ll be able to get a good balance of Spanish and English and hippies. The school subjectively had the best positive reviews from past students
A quick internet search suggested that Columbia and Mexico were the best places to learn Spanish to develop a neutral accent. Who knows if that’s the case, but that seemed to be the consensus of multiple web sites. Since Mexico was a more convenient location for us to start in order to cover all of Central and South America, we decided to start there. We can just start heading south and keep on going
Despite my dislike of traveling around the , for Christmas this year Team Curry Cracker will be giving themselves the gift of a super cheap lazy travel day to Mexico City. The combination of no hard schedule and a backlog of frequent flier really paid off. It seems nobody wants to fly on December 25th, so I was able to score some uber cheap frequent flier tickets. Any other day in the month of December would have had us spending $600 each, but on Christmas Day it was either $400 or 17,500 miles and $55.70. In a contest like that, miles wins every time.
We’ll spend a few relaxing days in the capital and then head up to San Miguel de Allende by bus. Probably with a couple beers