In the wrong band

I'm really bad at the "What languages do you speak?" game. English and nowhere near enough Spanish is a really boring answer, so sometimes I cheat a little and say I speak some Russian. It's not completely untrue: I can conjugate in the present tense; count to about twenty; and say important things like beer, wine, and ice cream. But I really can't have a conversation in Russian. Most of the people I encounter don't speak Russian themselves, though, so I can usually get away with it.

When I was traveling last week I had my landlord pick up my mail for me, and when I went to pick it up today a woman whom I'd never seen before answered the door. I was all set to speak Spanish with my landlord, but for some reason being faced with a stranger sent me into a tailspin and what came out of my mouth was more or less the Spanish equivalent of "I have traveled... I live upstairs... Tamara... collect... my mail." I suck. I think the woman at the door was my landlord's housekeeper and her Spanish, although way better than mine, wasn't great either. She told me to come back later and I said I would, but then we just kept talking in bad Spanish. She asked me if I'm an English speaker and if I speak any other languages, so I told her I speak a tiny bit (un pocito-ito-ito) of Russian. And then she started speaking Russian, dammit, and I had to admit I didn't understand a word (at least I remember how to say "I don't understand" in Russian). At the lowest point of the conversation, I found myself trying to explain, in a horrendous mix of Spanish and Russian why, at twenty-eight, I'm still single. Argh.

And in the continuing saga of "Spaniards are less concerned with personal injury and/or lawsuits than Americans are," I went to this aerobics class tonight. You know those big balls you see at the gym, people do crunches and stuff on them? Imagine one of those balls cut in half, then imagine jumping up and down on it (flat part on the floor, jumping on the round part). The possibilities for injury are numerous, and I didn't even have to sign a waver form. It was fun though; the instructor kept saying "¡Arriba!", which may be my favorite Spanish word. And the chorus of one of the techno songs they played repeated "Fuck you" over and over, which both made me laugh and, in a room full of Spanish people, made me feel like I was in on a little secret.