"Muy bien"

Sometimes, the only thing that comes to mind is “muy bien”.

Like when you’ve had a long weekend away from school and speaking very little Spanish and you suddenly walk into school and the teachers that usually speak English to you approach you with their super fast Spanish. I was asked three times (twice by the same professor) how my weekend was and I all I could say was “muy bien”. I think he caught on as he said “Everything is ‘muy bien’ then eh?” (Note: He was not speaking Spanglish…he did in fact say that whole sentence in Spanish). And to this I only nodded. No other word from my entire 10 years of studying Spanish could come to my mind or mouth fast enough to redeem myself.

I then tutored a high school girl who speaks no English, but is attempting to learn. Therefore even when I spell her words etc, it has to be in Spanish. And then we pronounce the word in English and try and make a sentence with it etc. Today I was trying to spell her “do” and I said “d” in Spanish and watched as she jotted down “the” proudly. I looked at her totally confused. And you know what I said? “Muy bien”. Because, she had in fact, written her first English word from listening. And although it’s not at all what I said, I was somewhat impressed that she wracked her brain to think of the recent words she had learned and tried to match the one that sounded most similar. (No worries, I did pronounce “the” correctly for her, after all).

Then I got home from my tutoring session and my concierge stopped me at the desk to tell me he had left me a package up at my apartment. Stellar. And my answer: “Muy bien, gracias”.

It’s only 12:11 pm and I’ve already managed three conversations using one single Spanish phrase. I’m about to see how far I can stretch it.