In my late teens I decided I liked everything in France and disliked everything in England. Pretty annoying and completely unrealistic. Anyway I went to France to work as an aupair girl and learnt to speak French. Every summer I went on Work Camps in the South of France run by Etudes et Chantiers with other young people from all over Europe and had a great time.
Aged 18 I told my family that one day I would live in South America, they just nodded as usual. I became a student and after a year took a whole year out on top of the previous gap year. During this year I went to work as an aupair girl in Spain and learnt to speak Spanish.
After getting a degree at Oxford Poly I took off to France and studied at Aix-en-Provence university for a total of four years, finally getting a Maitrise degree in sociologie with the thesis written in French – the eternal student. Then I returned to England on the longest train journey ever; it had not worked out in France and I was admitting that the French are so, well, French. Nor was there any job for me in England. It was time for my dream to come true: I departed for Chile.
To cut a long story short, I went to live in Coquimbo on the edge of the Atacama Desert. After two years in a rented house I moved to Guayacan, a shanty town part of Coquimbo. I wanted to see for myself what I had learnt about Third World Development in my sociology degrees. I built a house there, lived in the heart of the shanty town and became the Gringa of Guayacan. This way I ended up speaking Castellano: South American Spanish. The accent, words and grammar are different to Spanish spoken in Spain, like American is different to English in England. It was eleven interesting and sometimes challenging years of my life before returning to live in England.
I learnt French by doing the children’s homework with them when I was an aupair girl. I learnt Spanish at first with Tin Tin comic strip in Spain. Mainly, I was just immersed in the local culture and language, and learnt like a child. For this reason I don’t translate when I speak another language, I think in the language.
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