Let it be known that I bombed my first Spanish test. I mean demolished. I could describe this so very epicly (a real word?) and vividly but it would result in using words that would be less than tasteful because that is truly the only way to describe just how poorly I did on this exam.
It was the morning after we arrived in Barcelona and over a period of three days, I had gotten probably eight hours of sleep. And I use the word ‘probably’ very generously. Not to mention at this point, my body was still ferociously slaying the wheezing dragon that is my laryngitis and sinusitis. So all dramatization aside, I was incredibly tired and jet lagged.
After desayuno (breakfast) my awesome roommate and I (shoutout to my new friend Morgan) made our way to our demise, or what we thought was our Spanish language placement test. The two of us had taken Spanish for several years previously, and although we weren’t all that great at speaking, we understand quite a bit.
We started to take our test and slowly the the two professors took students to take part in an oral exam. After a few questions into the exam, I was feeling pretty good about my Spanish comprehension but it didn’t take long for the jet lag to aggressively punch me in the stomach and shake my head around like snow globe.
I stared blankly at my paper and Morgan looked over at me and whispered, “Are you jet lagged?”
“Oh my god I’m dying!” I’m quite certain I followed up with some comment about be ready to vomit. But we continued.
The letters swirled on my paper, much like my milk swirled in my morning coffee although far less pleasant. My oral exam was next and all the fragments of languages I knew (Polish, Slovak, Czech, French, Spanish, etc.) were meshing together to form a polyglot conglomerate stone that I think was supposed to function as a brain.
And that’s when I bombed it. I embarrassed myself and every language ever spoken ever. Because I could not say anything. I sat across from that poor and disgruntled professor and held my head and tried to spell my name and formulate some sort of sentence. In my defense, his accent is (to this day) a Spanish accent I have never encountered and it was incredibly difficult to understand when I was asking him for words to use in a sentence while speaking to him. As a result of that all of that, I employed all of the languages I knew and although French maybe have been somewhat understandable to throw in every so often, I KNOW Polish was not. Pero, it happened.
When I finished, I ran back to the other classroom in nauseated laughter. I had such an urge to cry and was just on the cusp of it when we breaked for café con leche outside on the balcony.
I think café con leche is my patron saint.
I somehow landed in the second level course but this was definitely not based on my speaking during the exam. My Spanish has drastically improved even since then- how could it not when you are thrown in the middle of a protest with only a notebook and the need to interview locals? But that’s another story for another post.
Karolina Chorvath 