Ah, the intercambio. Barcelona is full of people from all over Europe, Asia, and the US, and they all want to learn new languages. This is definitely a good city for it. Obviously, everyone speaks Castellano, or the Spanish we learned in high school. Just about everyone who grew up here also speaks Catalan, sort of like French and English in Montreal. Franco tried to eliminate the Catalan language and culture completely, viewing it as a divisive force, but there now exists a law that requires 80% of public school instruction to take place in Catalan.

Since Catalunya is a region that includes part of France (and Italy, too) and since we are only about ninety minutes from the border, there are quite a few people who speak French, too. And there are an assortment of English speakers from the US, UK, Germany, and Scandinavia. On boards all over the city, people put up cards offering to trade conversation in one language for another. Intercambio ads appear next to the personals (which, by the way, appear to be a mix between regular old personals and actual prostitution) in several free papers. Everybody’s doing it. It seems like an easy and cheap way to improve your fluency.

But what’s not easy is writing the ad, we discovered, because it is considered best to write in the language you wish to learn, perhaps as a way of alerting people about how difficult it might be to understand you. Leah and I wanted to go to one together, so we had to figure out how to write a short note, in Spanish, announcing that we were looking for another couple to hang out with, without having it attract freaks. Who knows what “we are looking for a couple to talk to and teach us Spanish” translates to in the world of personal ads?

Right away, we got a call. It was actually a text message on the phone with someone’s number, asking that we call him back. That’s sort of a dirty trick here, where cell phone calls are something like 15 cents a minute, but I called. It turned out that it was a guy who hadn’t really figured out that there were two of us and wanted to talk to me. It was weird, we thought, to see an ad posted by two people and only call one of them. But our Spanish is not to be trusted to convey the meaning we intend – it’s possible that we wrote “An American who wants to learn Spanish can meet, but only at two” - so we gave him the benefit of the doubt. We arranged to meet at the language school for an hour of chit-chat.

But think about it. What’s an hour of chit-chat with someone you don’t know, other than a blind date? Yeah, I don’t know either. In languages neither of you speak. Nothing’s worse than making someone repeat a sentence six times, word by word, only to find out it was something like, “This is a nice café, huh?”

Luis and I got into trouble right away, because he had said he wanted to meet at the language school where we had posted the ad, and it was freezing, so I went and sat in the lobby. When I noticed that he was fifteen minutes late, I went to check outside. There was an uneasy-looking man with a Spanish-English dictionary, shivering by the door. “Luis?” I said.

“You are inside?” he said. “We said ‘at the school.’ That means outside.” Here are the things you need to consider when a person says something like that to you in such a context:
1. Is this a language issue? That is, does “at” really mean “in front of” in Spanish?
2. Is he angry about waiting, or is it impossible to read someone’s inferences in a language they don’t really speak?
3. How do you apologize in a way that actually placates a mad person? In English, for example, if you were late to meet someone you had never met before, and you sensed that they were angry, you wouldn’t just say, “Sorry.”
4. Are some people wound up just a little too tight, in any language?

“Let’s go have a coffee,” I said, still not sure if the guy wanted to a) kill me, b) have a normal conversation in English, then one in Spanish, or c) go out on a date with my wife.

“Coffee?” he said, looking unhappy. Who’s unhappy to have a coffee in Spain?, I thought. “If you want.”

I decided to pay him back for agreeing to have a coffee that he didn’t really want by offering to speak English first. “Wait,” he said in Spanish. “Are you from England?”

“No,” I said. “The States.”

“Ah,” he said. “Because you have a really bad accent.”

“Accent?”

“Yes. It is really hard for me to understand. If you could speak without it…” What is a person supposed to do with information like this? Never mind that we had written “de los EEUU” on our ad. (We’re the EEUU, for reasons no one can explain. A few people have said that we would be the EU – Estados Unidos – except people would get it confused with the European Union. But the European Union is the UE here in Spain, and the abbreviation EEUU existed long before the EU. Not important.) Really, what? You try it. Speak without your accent for a minute. Say anything you want. No, no, don’t speak with a different accent. Just speak without your accent. I’m not sure that it’s possible. It certainly isn’t easy. Saying words syllable-by-syllable didn’t seem to make a difference: I was useless.

Finally, I managed to ask him where he was from. “Here,” he said. Then I asked if he lived in the city. “Yes,” he said. Where did you learn English? “Wall Street Institute,” he said. And so on. He rambled on a bit about his job – he paints cars at a local Nissan assembly line, and, in fact, will be going to England in February as a translator for other workers. Since his English really wasn’t too much better than my Spanish, I couldn’t imagine how that was going to work. Isn’t the Nissan corporation of sufficient size to employ actual interpreters?

While he was talking, I discovered another problem. In real situations – i.e., those not created by answering an ad off a bulletin board – one has a natural desire to know what someone is saying. Either they sell something you want, or someone you know has introduced you and you’d like to make a good impression, or whatever. But here, the purpose was to talk. Sure, plenty of people make friends via the language intercambio, and for the singles set they serve as a pretty reliable dating service. But the point is to learn, really. Or at least that’s how I was thinking about it, sitting there listening to something about why the guy lives with his parents.

The bubble disintegrated. No, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. That comes later. February, maybe? But I had somehow wound up in a real interaction, full of phrases like, “So I make for the work of paint” (him), or, “So, how long have I live to Barcelona?” (me). There was nowhere to hide. I had finally found the Achille’s Heel of the Illiteracy Bubble, other than letting electricians into your home: actual conversation. Who’da thunk it?

Somewhere along the line, we made plans to meet again. I have no idea why. And this is where the real fun starts. Remember that time when Gloria made me late for something by insisting that I sit down to have coffee with her so I could, ostensibly, tell her if Leah was around and hear that my electrician was actually an unskilled drunk? Well, she had another purpose in mind, and though there isn’t room here to detail it, it has plenty to do with intercambios. For now, suffice it to say she didn’t want me to go meet Luis.

So I arrived at my second appointment with Luis – in Spanish, incidentally, the word for appointment and date are the same: cita – a bit late. As I was walking – no, running, running – there, I remembered that the place we had arranged to meet, at that first meeting that I was in such a hurry to escape from, was Placa Catalunya. Arranging to meet at Plaza Catalunya is sort of like arranging to meet at the Boston Common. It’s not so huge that it seems unreasonable when you make the plans, but when you get there, you realize that it is much, much too large to serve as a meeting place.

I walked around the Placa twice, making myself even later, but did not see the coffee shop he had mentioned. So I called Leah. As it turned out, Luis had called our house (Leah had the phone) and told Leah that he was waiting out in front of an internet café near the Placa. I walked to the café. Or, as it turned out, a café. Like I said, it’s a big place.

That night, I got a call from Luis.

“Oh, I said. I am happy that calling me. You lost…no, I lost the morning. I am very sorry. I walked nearby and nearby in Placa Catalunya.”

He answered me in English. “Well,” he said, then paused. “I don’t know what to say.” Now, that’s a puzzler, when this is the person who I’m supposed to be teaching English. Was I to picture him standing like an angry parent, hands on hips? Or was I supposed to just sympathize? After all, I never know what to say, either. Usually when you use that phrase, you don’t mean it literally, but who knows?

“Yes,” I went on in Spanish. “I am very sorry. Like he says, I am in Placa Catalunya, walking nearby and nearby at 10:30.”

“So,” said Luis, who knows the past tense, sometimes, in English. “You were not able to come?” Another toughie. If someone fluent said this to me about something I missed, of course, I would say, “No, I got lost.” But here, maybe he was understanding. I decided to take my chances.

“Sure, sure. Yes.”

“Well, you should call,” said Luis. That was about when I figured out that I had guessed wrong.

“I am very sorry,” I said again. “I tried to go. But I lost.” At this point, he was probably wondering what the hell it was that I lost that took up my whole morning. He didn’t say anything.

“I got lost,” I said in English. “I was not able to find the café.” I became aware that my English was sounding like I was the one that needed to practice before a trip to England.

“Ohhhhhh,” he said, then switched back into Spanish. “When…think…no…wife,” he said.

“Vale.” Clear enough, since I already knew the story.

“And also…café…Placa Catalunya…morning…I…a little_______.” I had a pretty good how he meant to finish that one, too.

“Vale.”

“So, do you want to meet…or on…or at…?” he said, still in Spanish. The multiple choice questions are the toughest. Sometimes I don’t even catch the format, and just say, ‘Yes.’

“Sí,” I said, hoping he would throw in a little more information.

“Bueno,” he said. “Monday…five…Placa Catalunya.”

As we say in Spain, perfecto. Except that I didn’t particularly want to meet in the first place. We shall see.