Today, I went for my surfing lesson at 10 AM. It was great and in some ways more difficult than trying to teach myself how to surf.
My instructor asked me if I preferred Spanish or English, and I said Spanish is fine unless if I need something repeated. We stretched and then I started to learn how to do the pop up.
The thing I wasn’t prepared for was my instructor helping me, while I was on the board, to get past waves crashing towards us. I also didn’t know he would prefer me to stay on the board while doing that, since I’m used to just getting through the waves myself.
The funny thing is when he was bewildered with me when I missed a wave. He told me later that he said ‘are you ready for this wave?’ and I said ‘si?’ and he said yes. Funnily enough, I remember asking him a question along the lines of ‘the following one?’
He switched to English a bit, and the funny part is he literally said to me ‘this next wave is yours.’ I did literally nothing. After that miss, I told him it’s not necessarily the Spanish and laughed about it.
He used Spanish for the rest of the lesson with me. I’ve noticed that my Spanish has some holes while being here in Costa Rica. When I visited Argentina last year, that was different since it was about half a year after I started learning. Now it’s 2 years later so I am using it even more. The thing that sets me apart I would say from 90% of other language learners is that I will use it even if it makes things harder for me or makes me feel awkward.
I’ve spoken Spanish in return to Spanish people that switched to English to the point that they realized what they were doing, stopped, and then apologized. I’ve asked people who started speaking to me in English if they speak Spanish, and switched to Spanish even if that meant that my ability to speak became lower than my ability to understand them. Just today, a woman walking her dog said hi to me and I said hello back. When I first met her the other day in the same area, I spoke to her in Spanish — asking if I could leave my glasses with her for a moment while I swam, and asking about her dog. She was white, but I never considered to speak English to her.
The only people I let off the hook in not speaking Spanish, when I’m in Spanish speaking countries, are people whose native language is not Spanish. In the end of the day, I would rather be the guy speaking Spanglish for the words I do not know and hoping they understand (to reduce the issues around conversational ergonomics when additional word-searching is needed) — rather than the guy that easily defaults over to English.
On the other hand, the thing I’m learning is that I do need to learn some grammar. I’ve gotten pretty far with hundreds of hours of tutoring, and the overlap between Spanish and Romanian. But if I want to overcome some challenges, I need to restart vocab training, and some grammar exercises. For example, things that have tripped me up have been pronouncing caigo as cayo (ca-sho in my accent) for seemingly no reason, confusing enfrente with enfrenar, or saying ‘see you soon’ last week which I learned is more of a farewell than a see you soon as it would be in Romanian/English.
It’s little things like that which trip me up with Spanish. And as for surfing, there’s things that trip me there too.
My instructor also had told me in Spanish to paddle slowly, but I paddled like a mad man (in my words that’s how I would describe his gestures when he played it back to me). The same thing there, when he said it in English I understood he wanted me to paddle slowly. A few more attempts later, when he yelled ‘paddle paddle!’ I understood that as ‘you need to paddle fast!’
So clearly, there’s a difference in the nuance of how my brain interprets things. He told me if he wants me to paddle fast, he’ll say paddle fast or paddle hard. To that end, I figured when I hear paddle I should paddle what I consider to be slowly, when I hear paddle fast I should paddle normally, and when I hear shark as I joked to him I should paddle as I usually paddle.
That feedback is pretty helpful. The other thing that was pretty helpful was early on when he told me not to do big paddles, to basically scoop the water back, otherwise I can hurt my rotator cuff and be out of commission for months.
Before we started stretching, as we were making our way to the beach, I asked if he had braces since his teeth looked pretty damn perfect. He said they aren’t perfect and far from it. Turns out years back another surfer hit him and fled the seen. He woke up on the beach, covered in blood. Bystanders had taken a video and what had happened was the other guy got on the same wave he started (he was closed to where it was breaking), and when it was clear he would hit my instructor he jumped off with his board lurching forwards rather than sitting on it or braking.
My instructor echoed what I wrote yesterday on my blog, in that surfing carries real consequences. You can bet your ass I was grateful I finally ponied up for a lesson. I’ve got another one scheduled for Wednesday with another instructor. I was set on taking lessons from both of these 2 instructors from the start, since I figured it would give me a well rounded lesson (and afford me the opportunity to forget everything from the first lesson or close to it and not feel bad).
I am kidding about forgetting. My instructor did a great job and I caught some great waves. Even at the beginning of the lesson, where he was unhappy about everything I was doing (since I had no turning control), I was happy because I was already setting personal records for distance of a wave that I’ve ridden.
Funny enough, what made it possible for me to overcome all the little things tripping me up in achieving a surf that would make my instructor happy was a little distraction…
We’d already covered that I need to slow down (whether it was my paddling or popping up). At one point we even went back to shore to make sure I understood on the sand how I should make my pop up not suck so bad.
The other thing I understood was that I need to be more methodical. Looking behind for example could mess up my steps or bring me off center. I needed to go through each step of knowing where the wave was, paddling at a proper rate, and then when my instructor counted down when to pop up (3, 2, 1 — which is probably one of the most helpful things for a beginner that is trying to coordinate a dozen other things) — being ready to pop up by pushing my body up on my hands, putting my left foot horizontal to the board in the specific location it should be near the tail, and putting my right foot after that in another specific location.
So yeah, that made it work was a little distraction. He was telling me he’s making a surfing app, after I tried to respond by saying ‘yes the idea is,’ because I thought he was asking a question after I told him that I am in IT. As you can see, there’s either something terribly wrong with my ears, my Spanish comprehension, or my ability to mix them together while flying over crashing waves that my instructor is pushing me through like an Argentinian water man. Funny enough, they call people from Buenos Aires portenos, which means from a port city. I mentioned this in my blog yesterday, but it made me smile thinking about how accurate it is for this man.
But I digress… the surfing app he’s making hit a wall since he isn’t a tech wizard. His brother, that is, doesn’t want to help him with it. I can relate to that type of relationship and it made me laugh. That laughter and small distraction was enough to get the logical part of my brain to hibernate for a little, while I let the muscle memory and instruction take over.
It was that wave which rode which made my instructor happy, and I could even tell it went pretty well before I looked back.
During our lesson, my instructor spelled out that I am used to a fast life and need to slow down. If that’s not accurate, I don’t know what is. Even on the walk back he encouraged me to walk slower. I thought that was just something one of my best friends says because she’s a slow walker. He encouraged me to slow down. Here I was, walking back with the board, the lesson was over, he was hungry (probably hungrier than I was since he put in more effort during the lesson hauling me all over the ocean), and yet he was still teaching me.
While I was in the water and he said something about getting in tune with the flow of the ocean, while slowing down, I couldn’t help but think of Bad Bunny’s SNL skit. It’s kind of hard not to think of Bad Bunny when I hear ‘el oceano.’
But on the way back, I concurred with my instructor and told him these lessons are applicable to the rest of my life. Like that programming problem I did a few days ago which made me feel like an idiot. Rather than being methodical, and learning, skill by skill, pattern by pattern, and slowing down, I tried to solve a problem at 10 PM when I should have gone to bed — and I didn’t stop until 4 AM when I was extremely frustrated with myself.
So yeah, I had a 2 hour surfing lesson that helped me learn more about my pace and approach than I’ve learned in the past couple of weeks through different interactions in my life. There’s something to be said for that, despite all of the losses I incurred — be it my glasses, or be it words lost in translation. At the end of the day, I did something completely new and learned a lot, and grew in the process.
For that, I’m super grateful.
And afterwards, I went to get a burrito + an espresso milkshake. That milkshake is so good I ended up getting another. I also spoke to the owner of the restaurant again, who turns out to have the same problem of paddling too fast according to his instructor. I was happy to hear he’s inspired to go out surfing with his wife this week and is going to look for a leash for one of his boards that is missing it. I also discussed some business ideas + challenges with him and how he’s solving them.
All in all, it was a great day and I’m looking forward to the last few days here before I fly back to the states.