Uyuni, Potosi, Sucre

This past weekend was incredible. We traveled from Uyuni to Potosi to Sucre within 4 days. Something that always caused difficulties for us was communicating with people, even though the majority of us speak Spanish.  Our pronunciation of certain words, especially with the "r," sticks out like a sore thumb. It was interesting though because more people we encountered in Sucre had to ask us to repeat ourselves than I've experienced in La Paz. Which may have just been circumstantial, but it brought to light existing language barriers I hadn't noticed before. One of the most memorable events of these happened when we were trying to get the airport in Sucre to return back to La Paz.  Our taxi driver thought would not give us a direct answer when we asked him to take us to the airport, or maybe he did and it was lost in translation.  We told him to follow the cab in front of us, and then he turned down another road.  After that, the chaos unfolded.  We were all trying in poor Spanish to tell him where we need to go but he wasn't making any sense. He wasn't answering our questions, and if he would he would answer with unintelligible Spanish that our newborn ears couldn't process.  We ended up getting out and hopping in another cab. The guy was really nice about it and we all just gave up on trying to understand what was going on.

The point is, there are certain colloquialisms, accents, and words that we still do not recognize.  And I think it's fascinating that someone could say something to me in Spanish and me not understand at all. When I was in that cab, I thought about a Hispanic, Arabic, or Asian person in the US who is learning English and how they probably experience communication difficulties on a daily basis.  I immediately felt a connection to my language-learning counterparts. Its freaking hard to learn a language much less communicate it efficiently and accurately to fluent speakers.  Some people don't have much sympathy for non-English speakers in the US, even though there's technically not an official language.  I wonder if Bolivians feel that same unsympathetic sentiment about us gringos speaking English to each other.  Maybe so, maybe not. It's hard to tell sometimes.  I just know I'm never going to get frustrated when people can't speak English in the US.