Day 1 of our first ever lesson in Español. We decided to walk there for the exercise, a leisurely 50 minute walk.

Is our class is an American, Nick, in his 50's. His daughter lives in Chile, so after retiring, he and his wife have moved here for 2 years. Nick has already completed 4 weeks of classes and decided to come back and start all over again. Comforting.

Then there is Pierre-Jean, from Belgium. Also in his 50's he has moved to Chile to start a business that he won't tell us about. He likes to talk, but doesn't much like to listen. He already seems to speak what sounds like a fair bit of Spanish to us, but says he wants to learn the basics.

Ben is early 20's from Germany. He did Spanish at school but hasn't done much since, but seems to know some words and works things out much faster then us.

No matter which way you cut it, we are the only real beginners in this room.

The lesson passed in a bit of a blur. We wrote some things, said some things, pretended to understand some things, then at 1pm class was dismissed. What just happened? Where is the English? I can't understand all that Spanish...

Ok. Homework. Before we did our homework we decided a revision of the days class would be best. Thankfully it all made a lot more sense 3 hours later. The homework only took about 1 1/2 hours longer and wasn't at all related to what we did in class so required some google translate and reading ahead to other lessons to work it out.

Day 2. La Profesora asked how we went with the homework on pages 8, 9 and 10. The class now understood why we struggled. She had accidentally told us pages 11, 12 and 13! Nonetheless we got the answers right.

Day 2 we actually felt like we had some idea of what was going on, which was a big relief. We may just learn something after all! Homework only took about 45 minutes.

We are now at the end of week 1. Time in class 15 hours, time revising and homework 37 hours, hours to be spent revising this weekend, not sure there is enough time for what needs to be done. A working week is far easier than this! Apparently it'll pay off at some point.

Having said that it is acutally starting to come together and make some sense. Though today got a little bit hard as we've found out we need to go back to English class and relearn verbs, adjectives, nouns and whatever else belongs with those categories.

Thankfully our Spanglish worked well enough to buy as a bottle of vino, as it's purchsed through a locked gate. So now it's off to reward ourselves with a $6 bottle of local Cab Sav. Apparently the $10 bottles are the top of the range, so a $6 one is looking good.

LAPFWT