Peru, 2017: textbook Spanish meets market Spanish

By the time I got to Peru I could conjugate. I had done the exercises. I could tell you, in three tenses, what I would do if I had more time. What I could not do was buy a kilo of potatoes without going pink.

Textbook Spanish and market Spanish are different animals. The textbook gives you complete sentences. The market gives you half a sentence, a raised eyebrow and a price that moves depending on how you ask.

The first thing I learned was that ¿Cuánto cuesta? opens a door but does not walk you through it. The sentence that actually does the work is the softer one: ¿Me lo deja en…? — will you let it go for…? It is polite, it is a little playful, and it assumes a relationship rather than a transaction.

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.