Sutton and Josey: Spanish Language Immersion in Panama

  Today is our final day in Panama, and we can’t and don’t want to believe it is already over. Our last A-Term at POHS has flown by!  In honor of this special day, we woke up an extra hour early to watch the sunrise at the Cinta Costera. With tired eyes, we hobbled down the never-ending flights of stairs at La Isabela Suites and then carefully played real-life Crossy Road to dodge the speedy morning traffic. For a place where coffee shops don’t open until 9am, there sure are lots of early risers.  While the sky was a little cloudy, it was still beautiful when the sun rose above the clouds and lit up the colorful streets and structures of downtown Panama. The reflection on the ocean was almost blinding, which made “smiling” during Jessica’s photoshoot rather challenging. Turning away from the rippling waves, Casco Viejo from afar looks like one of those picturesque, 4000-piece puzzles.  After our morning sightseeing, Josey cooked one final breakfast using the remainder of our food. We

  Mini tacos de pescado Mini fish tacos Dip de espinacas y cangrejo Spinach and Crab Dip Pizza de salmón ahumado Smoked Salmon Pizza The photos we took of ourselves were incredibly...unfortunate-looking today, so the Day 12 photo blog will feature a larger assortment of photos! Don't worry!

This morning, we arrived at class and quickly completed our lesson on preterito imperfecto. This included some practices with listening to stories and filling in the blank with the proper conjugation of verbs. We thought this would be relatively straightforward since we have been working hard to master this tense all week, but there are always some irregularities that catch us off guard. Hector then shared a brief lesson on the difference between muy and mucho. We found that muy normally translates to “very” and mucho translates to “a lot.” Whether or not you use mucho/muchas/mucha/muchos depends on the location of verbs, pronouns, adverbs, and sustentivos (nouns). We did well on the worksheet practice, but the speaking practice is challenging since your mind has to take the time to visualize the sentence. We felt like we were talking like sloths and we hoped our more fluent classmates didn’t doze off too much.  The final part of our morning was putting together preterito imperfecto an

  Un barco usando los locks A boat using the locks El Noreweigan Jewel The Norweigan Jewel Un vista del Canal A view of the Canal Sutton en admiración del cielo Sutton admiring the sky                                                  

This morning we got ready a little earlier and decided to make a quick coffee run before school. This would give us a chance to practice our Spanish and get a boost of energy before our four hours of classes. Unfortunately, we quickly realized that Panamanians do not run their coffee shops with the same sense of urgency and efficiency as the US. Not only were NONE of the stores open yet (it was 8am!), but the one store that was open was…well, let us explain. After walking around for a few minutes, we located the singular shop that was open and slipped in thinking 10 minutes should still be plenty of time to get a cup of coffee. Turns out, it was nowhere near “quite enough time” so it was slightly embarrassing to stumble into our class a few minutes late, but luckily not any later than our classmate Felizando. Also, to our surprise, Ervan was also there. Turns out he had just skipped school yesterday, but he was back and Sutton was able to finally put a name to the stories.  During clas

This morning, we arrived at Casco Antiguo for Spanish class and were promplty greeted with a pleasant surprise: we have been moved back to Héctor's class! I was beyond excited, and Sutton was also excited to get to have a class with someone she had heard so much about. We also met our new classmate, Felizando, who is giving Lisa a run for her money in the languages category. He is from Mozambique and speaks Portuguese and French, but is already pretty good at Spanish and says he plans to learn English next. Our class began with learning some grammar and rules around the use of accents (or “tildes”) on nouns. There were many rules associated with this grammar rule, but luckily there weren’t too many exceptions and irregularities. After learning and practicing with the syllables, we went back to review preterito infinitivo and ser and estar practice, and did some worksheet pages before answering question prompts. This ended up being very fun because we got to learn a little more abo