Language Barriers and Flat Tyres
In exactly four weeks time, I will be flying to Madrid to begin my Year Abroad. And I cannot wait. Up until the last few weeks, I have been absolutely terrified about the prospect of my Year Abroad due to the fact that I had not yet got a place to live, the city that I would be living in is 3 hours away from the next big city and airport, I didn't know anyone else going to that area, and, most importantly, I was not confident in my Spanish. I have, however, managed to expel my fear of speaking Spanish, and now the other fears don't seem that important. Let me explain.
I have just arrived back from a holiday with my boyfriend where we spent a week in a small mountain village in the Algarve called Alte. When we arrived at the airport, I was horrified to realise how many of the Portuguese signs I did not understand. I had been quite looking forward to practising my Portuguese, which I thought was at a pretty high standard, and yet there I was wandering aimlessly around the airport trying to find the sign for 'shuttlebus'. Safe to say my confidence was absolutely shot; for the next three days, I refused to say another word in Portuguese aside from the occasional 'obrigado'. That was until we got a flat tyre.
We had hired a little 50cc motorbike to allow us to travel to the nearby towns, and at 10:30pm as we left a small restaurant that was around a 30 minute drive from our hotel, we realised that the back tyre on the bike was completely flat. The hire company called someone to get the bike, as well as a taxi to get us home. Unfortunately, neither of the people who arrived spoke English. After some fruitless attempts at hand signals and simple English, I decided it was about time I stepped up and put my degree to good use. And I amazed myself. One of the men had a very strong regional accent, and so I found it easier to just ask him questions that required a sim or não answer, and we managed to establish what had happened to the bike, that it needed to be taken to a garage for us to collect the next day, and that my boyfriend and I didn't have to pay anything.
I was genuinely shocked that I had made myself understood so easily, and I realised then what my language teachers have been telling me for years: you are not expected to speak the language perfectly, just get your point across, and the locals will appreciate the effort. I didn't speak English to any of the locals after that, and felt embarrassed that I ever had. As the language barrier was the thing that most worried me about living abroad, my week in Portugal has taught me to get over the fear of it and just speak. I felt 100 times more comfortable with my language skills in just a week, so I'm sure now that I will quickly pick up the Spanish of Badajoz once I am immersed in it.
A tip to all my fellow Year Abroaders: don't wait until you are 'forced' to speak a foreign language like I was, make the decision yourself as soon as you arrive and when you realise how much you actually know, you'll feel like a total languages bad-ass.
