Living abroad is awesome! Although I am sad that it lastes for only 4 weeks.
For the most part Anja and I have no problems when it comes to the language barrier, because we have learned to just guess what they are saying. We that is true for the most part. Not at work though, at work it sometimes took quite a but for us to understand them.
Often times we just guess what they asked based on patterns and the context.
For example in grocery stores when they ask you something, we have learned to guess that they asked if we want a bag. Because after a few times we sort of recognized the word.
Or in a restaurant when they come to you and ask you, we assume they ask about what we want to drink. Because the first couple of times when they tried putting it in the way that we would understand, they were always asking that. So we just pretended to understand and just answer “dos aguas por favor”, which means “two waters, please”.
When we go the bakery on our lunch break where we buy ourselves food we just started pointing at the microwave to heat it up. Because the first few times we were so confused on what they were asking that they just pointed at it to gesture if we wanted it to be heated up. And to tell them “finito” after we are done ordering.
In the workshop where we work it was kind of the same. For the most part we were just observing what they were doing and their hand gestures, and tried to figure out from that what our instructions were.
If we got lucky they said maximum of five English words while explaining everything in Spanish. But overall I think it just made things more fun because we were just amused with ourselves for trying and sometimes failing to understand them.
We often times just laughed because neither of us understood. Sometimes though we just pieced everything together. One of us understood one part of the instructions and the other one understood the other part.
So it was definitely never boring at the workshop, because if nothing alse we found ourselves very entertaining for having to guess everything that was said to us.
