Lo Siento, My Spanish Is Very Evil
From arepas to existential crises via the wrong side of a Bogotá exchange rate, one idiot’s journey through four countries, three tenses, and an unrelenting street party in Taganga.
Just another day in BA. Buenos Aires, Argentina. April 2025.
It started, as most disasters do, with good intentions and terrible grammar. I arrived in Latin America armed with Duolingo streaks, a handful of polite phrases, and the absolute conviction that immersion would unlock some dormant part of my brain where high school Spanish lay sleeping.
Instead, what woke up was Italian.
Not even useful Italian. Not the bits that resemble Spanish. No, my brain lovingly served up the obscure leftovers of a Milanese grandmother’s insult dictionary while I stood in front of a Colombian pharmacist trying to ask for something to settle the stomach and instead mutter something that loosely translated to “the fat eggplant falls heavily in the marketplace.”
It became a recurring issue. I would approach a counter, clear my throat, and confidently say, “Lo siento, mi Español es muy mal,” which is how I ended up apologising to countless people for my Spanish being very evil. I knew it was wrong. I knew it. But could I remember “no bueno”? No, I could not. My mouth is where syntax goes to die.
Sometimes, I wouldn’t even make it that far. Someone would rattle off specials, and I’d nod along, laughing gently, hoping I wasn’t agreeing to eat goat kidneys with condensed milk. Whole conversations happened around me, over me, through me. I stood in markets and train stations like a broken antenna–vaguely aware of signals, unable to translate any of them into meaning.
And yet, nothing makes you feel quite as cosmopolitan as being pitied in multiple countries.
It happened often. That particular look–half sympathy, half “bless your little colonial heart” as I tried to ask for the bill and instead asked to be baptised. There is a silent community of language strugglers out there. You see it in the wild eyes of the man in Bogotá accidentally telling a street vendor he’s pregnant. You see it in the way someone in Medellín mouths “help me” while ordering coffee.
But if linguistic failure is the wound, money is the salt.
I pride myself on being the sort of person who pays their way–quietly, competently, preferably without causing a scene. This is how I found myself leaving what I thought was a generous tip in Mexico… only to realise I’d left 20 pesos instead of 200. That’s not exactly generosity. The poor woman chased us down the street after dinner, waving the note like it had insulted her grandmother. I felt like a colonial overlord tossing doubloons at peasants, which is not the vibe I aim for.
Public transport didn’t help. I spent a week trying to understand Mexico City’s bus system before realising it’s less of a system and more of a philosophical challenge. Schedules? Optional. Stops? Illusory. The bus may or may not come. If it does, it will be playing tinny reggaeton covers of ABBA songs and swerving like it’s dodging sniper fire. You will be standing. You will be sweaty. You will be clinging to a handrail that’s already been clung to by a thousand other lost souls.
In Santa Marta, the buses get smaller and the chaos more personal. You’re not riding public transport so much as entering a mildly hostile group chat on wheels. The driver’s teenage cousin takes the money while making direct eye contact and eating a hotdog. A man gets on selling toothbrushes. A goat gets on. You get off three stops too early out of sheer panic.
And all the while, your luggage limps behind you, mourning its dignity. Because I do not travel with wheeled luggage. I loathe wheeled luggage. I despise the little clicky-clacky noise they make on cobblestones. I hate how they topple like drunk toddlers and demand ramps, like precious Victorian invalids. I carry my bag on my back like a real man. I sweat. I suffer. I am superior.
Not that it matters when you’ve checked into a dodgy hovel in Taganga with a ceiling fan from the Nixon era and a view of what turns out to be the WORLD’S LOUDEST STREET PARTY. Not just loud. The Who at Leeds would’ve packed up and gone home in shame. The bass didn’t shake the windows; it rearranged my organs. I lay on the bed vibrating gently like an unbalanced washing machine, telling myself that at least I wasn’t dragging a Samsonite through the gravel like some kind of corporate stooge.
Food? A mixed bag. I really tried with arepas. I wanted to love them. Everyone else seemed to. But each one I ate tasted like polenta left out in the sun. I’m not saying they’re objectively bad. I’m saying they’re the edible equivalent of a shrug. Nothing makes you feel like a failed adventurer quite like rejecting the local staple in favour of hot chips and gravy eaten with a spork.
Even greetings betrayed me. “Buenos días,” sure. But what about that weird twilight zone where it’s too late for buenos días and too early for buenas tardes? Is there a secret middle-ground greeting? Is there a time-stamped checklist? I gave up and just started waving vaguely at people, like a minor royal inspecting a meatworks.
Of course, amid all the incompetence and confusion, there were moments. Fleeting ones. A smile at a taco stand where no words were needed. A nod from the abuela who saw me try–really try–to say thank you with sincerity, if not accuracy. A moment when a child handed me a piece of fruit, and we both understood that this was the entire conversation.
That’s the real trick of it, I think. The further your language skills decay, the more your humanity has to show up. You start smiling more. Pointing. Gesturing. Laughing. You become expressive in ways your home-language self might never allow. And people, more often than not, meet you there.
Because this is what I’ve come to understand about travel.
I don’t travel to escape - I travel to be thumped repeatedly in the soul by everything I don’t understand. I seek out the disorientation, the noise, the stomach-turning arithmetic of foreign currency, because it slices through the numbing hum of home. Travel, for me, is less about reinvention and more about dismantling. It strips away competence and ego, leaving just enough of you intact to marvel at the absurdity of being alive in a world that doesn’t care you’ve just accidentally tipped someone $5 for an 80-cent bottle of water.
So no, I’m not out here avoiding responsibility. I’m out here failing publicly in new languages, being wrong in exciting new ways, and praying that the next bus isn’t a hallucination. And somehow, between the indignities and the bowel betrayal, something in me realigns. Not neatly. Not permanently. But enough to remember: being cracked open beats being comfortably closed.