¡Hola!

As a student from Southern California, it’s not a huge surprise that, in high school, Spanish became my language of choice. Living only 30 minutes from the US-Mexico border, Spanish could give me chances to travel, work with different communities, and pad my job résumé. However, what I did not anticipate was the difficulty of learning said language: throughout high school, Spanish class was the absolute bane of my existence, with los acentos and el género de los sustantivos haunting my dreams. Had you told me back then that I would still be taking Spanish classes in college, and willfully going abroad to take all of my classes in Spanish, I would have laughed. Yet here I am, after six academic years of Spanish, preparing to go to Argentina for 5 months to do just that.

While I am incredibly excited to go and practice my Spanish in a Spanish speaking country, I am also rather nervous about going to a Spanish speaking country for the first time. That’s right, despite my close proximity to Mexico, I have yet to actually go anywhere with Spanish as the national language. And, despite my years of study, I can still manage to sound like someone who spent three weeks with Rosetta Stone and Ricky Martin music videos when I hablo Español. Yes, that fluent. So, while the excitement is mounting as I count down to my departure (14 days!), self-consciousness about my communication skills is also on the rise. Either my Spanish is going to magically improve when I touch down in Buenos Aires (not likely), or I should just stamp “tourist” onto my forehead (I think it’s already written there).