Peru, 2017: textbook Spanish meets market Spanish
The second thing was that nobody was in a hurry. Buying vegetables took as long as it took. If you rushed it you got your vegetables and nothing else. If you didn't, you got the vegetables, an opinion about the weather, and sometimes la yapa — the little extra thrown in for free at the end.
Somewhere in that week my Spanish stopped being a subject I had studied and started being a thing I used. That switch does not happen in a classroom. It happens the third time you make the same joke to the same woman and she laughs before you finish it.
I left with worse grammar than I arrived with and far more Spanish. I still think that trade was correct.
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