Muchas Gracias - Hasta Luego!

In an attempt to improve the Spanish I learned my first year of college - and while waitressing in a French Hungarian restaurant with Peruvian cooks - I took four semesters of Spanish at the Harvard Extension School a few years ago. I really enjoyed the classes and felt almost reasonably fluent for awhile there. Then I moved on to other subjects and slowly my newly acquired vocabulary seemed to fade away. If you asked me, say, how to conjugate irregular verbs in the future tense, I would most likely look at you blankly even though I received an A on that exam. Problem - I rarely get a chance to speak Spanish. But sometimes I do. A few days ago an older man was in the store and I, the resident language expert (my French is pretty decent as befits the owner of "Joie de Vivre") - was called out to help. He was from Chile, and interested in the KitKat Clock. And we wound up communicating almost entirely in Spanish. It's not quite like riding a bicycle, but it does come back, and it's so fun and satisfying to be able to help in another language. And I learned a few new words too - like "pila" is the preferred word for batteries in Chile. So . . . viene a Joie de Vivre para hablar conmigo! Ou - nous pouvons parlor francais! ou . . essayer . . .