Crepes, Chile y Charlar

Having half of Tuesday free, Courtney (one of my roommates) and I decided to get back to the East Village, find some cool shopping and hit the town, just the 2 of us. We had to go back to the East Village, because I noticed that a pair of shoes that I got at the Tibetan store had one size 38 and one size 36. Once again, we took green line to Astor Place and took the route that Bethany and I had carved out the day before. The only problem was that none of the stores were open quite yet. Courtney was starving and we managed to spot a tiny little crepe restaurant. At first we couldn’t gauge where the owner was from—initially we were thrown off by her accent and the fact that she was making crepes, so we thought maybe French? I finally ventured to ask her and she said she was from Chile! She was in New York to study pilates and had only been there for about 6 months. Being that Courtney and I are studying Spanish, we both got that hesitant look like, “ok, we should be practicing Spanish now…” and finally I made the slight comment that I felt like I should be speaking Spanish and Teresa (the owner) said she would love to help us practice. So for about the next hour we engaged in a conversation about the weather, NYC, Chile, education and other random things here and there.

I’m sure I screwed up a lot, but Teresa assured us that our Spanish was great and that she was impressed. I have to admit that once you can get past those first few sentences in a conversation, you can probably continue speaking. Often times, I am struck with the fear that I will say “¿Qué tal?” and they’ll start going into a rapid fire conversation with lots of slang and I’ll just have to nod and say “sí, sí”, which doesn’t actually mean I can speak Spanish. It just means I’m terrified.

There’s something exhilarating about speaking Spanish; even a conversation about the weather feels like flirting. And it’s because of little intimate moments like these that I continue to advocate that more beauty and happiness is found through these unique interactions than in a tourist attraction site, even if it’s filled with rich, historic information. Sometimes you can be separated by a language, a continent or an ideology, but usually you can be reunited through humanity.