Do you ‘get’ Dalí?

Cat has officially taken her longest vacation in over half a decade. Yes, it’s only been a week. Her work ethic is the kind of thing Europeans furrow brows and shake heads at. You can tell she was nearing burnout by this picture I snapped of her during a work videoconference just before our break:

Business up top, party down below.

In an effort to help recharge her batteries, I’ve been a most gentlemanly traveling companion. I’ve been doing all the ordering, asking, talking, paying. I mean, I speak French. She doesn’t. She’s been making up for that by repeating that she speaks some Spanish from the SEVEN YEARS she studied it.

I’ve even been mostly carrying all the heavy shit. With ice cream as fuel, of course.

So we arrived in España after a beautiful few days in Collioure, maybe my favorite town in the world. We had a couple hour layover until the next train left. That’s when I realized that in her seven years of Spanish, she learned how to conjugate dozens of irregular verbs, but not how to ask for the bill at a bar. We ended up with an extra round of beers, which in hindsight wasn’t such a bad thing.

It reminds me of the month I spent traveling around Mexico with my dear friend, Matt Acosta. Matt is mustachioed and half-Mexican, but never learned a lick of Spanish. Every single person we met would go off on tirades of Spanish toward my unsuspecting comrade, after which he would awkwardly point to me and somehow nonverbally communicate that my Franco-American ass was their best chance at getting a few words across.

It goes to show that a bit of conversational spanish followed by practice can be a lot more helpful than years of rote learning and testing. I found this reddit AMA from last year about learning languages fascinating. Alas, I digress. We made it to the Teatro-Museo Dalì in Figueras, where we saw some wonderful art.

Fairly tame, but a bit weird.

Getting weirder…

As we walked through the museum, as the weirdness reached a mind boggling crescendo, Cat stopped and asked me seriously, “Do you get it?”

“I don’t think I ever ‘get’ art, but I like it.” I replied. This turned out to be the best joke I’d ever told, as Cat actually laughed out loud. The best I’d ever gotten before was slightly a stronger exhale through her nose. I can’t express how gratifying that was.

Weirdest. Seriously. What the fuck.

Thankfully, after a couple days here in Spain, Cat’s Spanish has been coming back, and mine is even improving a bit. People actually smile at our efforts before immediately reverting to English!

Get it?