How to Make Friends in Spanish
An Auspicious Start to the New Year
After years in California, I find the sounds of Spanish completely comforting.
If I go into coffee shop and overhear strangers speaking en Espanol, ordering food, laughing, joking, I never know what they’re saying, but the words and cadences, and rhythms are completely familiar.
But the trouble comes when you try to make friends, or try to integrate more fully. When I meet someone who is local, who isn’t totally proficient in English, and try to speak Spanish, I resort to using google translate. I try a new word of Spanish, which the native speaker corrects, and then I walk away, frustrated and ashamed of my inability to communicate. If the person is proficient in English, and in a tourist friendly town like this, many people are, they just speak to me in English as if to say “I’ll resort to using your language so you don’t have to butcher mine.”
My husband says we’ve come down to Costa Rica to practice our skills at charades.
Before we moved to Playa del Coco we lived in a surf-town called Jaco
where we had one German friend who was fluent in three languages. She had come to Costa Rica on a surfing vacation and moved down because she fell in love with a Tico surf instructor.
“How do you make friends here?” I asked her one day.
“It’s easy.” She said. “You go out into the waves in the morning with your surfboard. Then, you look around while you’re waiting to catch a wave. You say hi to whoever is there, and you strike up a conversation when you get back on the sand.”
I paused.
“Nikka,” I said, “My husband and I do not surf.”
She paused. “If you want to make friends” she said, “you have to surf.”
We decided to move to a different town.
In Playa del Coco there are no surfers because there is no surf. Coco is on a Bay, and a lot of people come to retire, to fish, to enjoy the low cost of living, People walk on the beach, they boat and fish, they swim in the bay without the fear of getting hit in the head by a random surfboard coming into shore, or being harrassed by tourists asking where the party is at.
In Coco, the way you make friends is this.
You’re at a coffee shop. You overhear someone speaking in English. Your ears perk-up. You turn around. You say, “pardon me, are you American?” They say “No. Canadian.” It doesn’t matter. They speak English. So you ask, “Are you visiting or do you live here?” They say, “I just moved here.” Or “I’m a digital nomad,” or “I’m a snowbird.” And then you exchange WhatsApp information and become best friends.
Do you have anything in common? Probably not. Do you like each other? Not necessarily. Do you both speak English? Yes – Poof! It’s destiny. You are meant to be buddies.
I used to wonder how anyone could live in a country and not learn the native language. Now I understand. It’s quite easy. You move there with other people who speak your language. You set up a network of friends in a single location. You find one person who is really adept at picking up new vocabulary, and you let them translate for you for the next twenty years.
You never leave the neighborhood.
It took me a year to make friends with a native Spanish speaking poet.
When I was at Wave Books in Tamarindo I saw a book of poems by a local author. I looked him up on Facebook, which is where the country does most of its communicating, and found he had just moved to Playa Del Coco to escape the bustle and crumbling economy of the city.
We became friends based on our mutual interest in writing, my desire to practice Spanish, and his desire to, well, correct my spanish.
I would meet with him at Claudio y Gloria on the beach. I wanted to drink but he would bring me very thoughtful gifts of Spanish language children’s books and sheets of instructions on proper verb conjugation. I thanked him, and skimmed both while we ordered margaritas. Then we spoke in half-English, half-Spanish. As the night went on and I got drunker and drunker, and he kept correcting my pronunciation and conjugation I finally told him,
“Raul” I said, “It’s too hard. It’s too much too fast.” “I’m just trying to learn basic vocabulary now. If I stay another year I’ll learn how to conjugate verbs. If I stay a year after that, I’ll learn how to use past and future tenses. This year I am just Tarzan. I want to learn how to say “I want beer.” Next year I’ll learn how to say “You want beer, She wants beer, they want beer, we want beer” and the year after that, if we’re still here, I’ll learn how to say “I wanted a beer, she wanted a beer, tomorrow they will want beer, We will want beer forever.” But I can only handle so much right now.
Since then he’s spoken to me mainly in English. But occasionally I do ask him for a new vocabulary word.
Occasionally we meet to write poetry - me in Spanish, him in English, so we can see what weird new accidents we can make by trying to translate.
I’m going to come away from Costa Rica speaking a poet’s version of Spanish. I can make comparisons between things, recite some Neruda, describe how the hills are like breasts and the earth is a beating heart, but I still can’t ask what’s for lunch or remember the words for fork and spoon.
Over the summer I met a new friend and wanted to impress her with my Spanish.
She said she lived in Coco, but I wanted to know where she was born. I couldn’t remember the word for “born,” so I grappled and grappled for an equivalent, and finally asked her “Donde esta usted Navidad” which I think translates to “Where is your Christmas?” When she didn’t understand, I did what all tourists do. I spoke louder and gesticulated more emphatically. I asked “Donde esta tus Navidad,” then remembered that using “tus” with a stranger is rude, so changed it to “Donde esta la Navidad de Usted.” I may have been incoherent, but at least I wanted to seem polite.
It didn’t help that I had already consumed one or two Pina Coladas at this point.
Finally I gave up and just asked her, in English “where are you from” followed by the important question, “how do you ask this in Spanish?”
De Donde Eres?
Basic. Spanish. One o One.
Have I mentioned we’ve only been here two years now?
But on New Years Eve things started to change.
Before New Year Raul kept telling us he had a new girlfriend from America. We asked where she was from and he kept telling us “R. Kansas.” He said it several times before I finally asked, “where is R. Kansas. I’ve never heard of that place before. Is it a city?”
He said it a few more times, “You know,” He said. “The state, R. Kansas.”
It took me a while to realize he meant Arkansas. I told him the last s is silent.
Yes! He shouted. Are Kansa!
“The S is silent.” I said.
And people say it’s hard to learn a new language.
On New Years Eve we finally met her.
Before I tell you about it, let me set the scene.
New Years Eve was a level of insanity I hadn’t seen in years.
It’s the first time since the pandemic that the place has been open to the public and it was packed. The whole town was out in the streets, along with several other towns that had been bussed in for the festivities. Down at the beach an American cover band played American songs, while tourists and locals swarmed around the stage, making a crowd that extended from the edge of the bar that hosted them all the way into the break of the waves on the beach. Away from the light of the restaurant it was so dark we had to navigate our way through the crowd by the light of stars and the sound of the surf roaring into the sand. The band was good. Very good. So good in fact that for the first time in my life I understood the lyrics to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and got nostalgic for the 90’s.
But all the restaurants along the beach were so packed that you had no hope of getting a table. People crowded all around the outskirts of the restaurants drinking their own beers and passing their own joints. I tried to break through the crowd to use the restroom at Bamboo Bar and was told, “only for customers.”
“But I’m a customer.” I explained. “I come here every day of the week except today.” I said.
But the bouncer didn’t care. He was a kid, who looked to be about seventeen, here just for the night, just to make sure nobody got in except “customers.” I was pretty sure that I could take him. But I didn’t want to cause a scene.
So, I did what anyone would do in that situation – snuck behind the bungalows and peed in the jungle, because this is still my territory and I felt the need now to mark it to make sure everyone knew.
While in the crowd though, we did finally meet Raul’s girlfriend, Elle. Maybe “meet” is the wrong word. It was so loud that we couldn’t actually speak to her or hear anything she said. The whole night she remained a blur of curly, brown hair that we noticed rubbing up against our friend, and his blur of curly brown hair in front of the bright, blaring blue lights behind them. .
From what I remember of the shouting over the music though, this shadowy silhouette of hair lives just down the street from us, across from the fruit stand, at the crossroads between us and town.
We made a plan to invite her and Raul over later to eat leftover tamales and actually see her face later next week.
January 3rd
Since then we’ve discovered that Raul is so much more fun to hang out with now that he has a girlfriend.
And by girlfriend, I mean translator.
She’s been here five years and works in elementary education. Her Spanish is impeccable and when we want to ask Raul something, and he looks confused, she repeats our question to him in Spanish. When he gets caught up on a word, he asks her what the English equivalent is, and she tells him.
How thoughtful of Raul to date someone bilingual.
His English is by far better than our Spanish will ever be, but there’s still a barrier.
My husband and I think we are funny people. Whenever we get into an Uber together people say we should have a podcast.
But in Costa Rica, our jokes never hit. We say something clever and the person who is a native Spanish speaker looks at us for a moment, trying to compute. It’s worse than watching your computer buffer. By the time they actually understand the terribly witty and whimsical thing we’ve said, the timing has been ruined and the joke flops. It leaves me and my husband wondering if we have a cultural barrier or if we have, tragically, lost our comedic edge.
Now that Elle is here, she’s reassured us, it’s the former. Our language barrier is blunting the razor sharp wit of our jokes. She thinks we’re hysterical.
So here we are, making new friends, practicing our Spanish, eating the rest of the tamales.
Peeing in the jungle.
An auspicious start to the new year.
