So I have to say, of all the tasks that I have done, this was the least fun, even though it didn't culminate in the near death of any of my close friends relationships. Any task where someone replies to one of your sentence/charade attempts with ‘You want me to pull your hair? What the fuck?’ isn’t going to be an easy one.

The backdrop:
My foreign language skills are non-existent. I took 4 years of French, 2 in high school and 2 in college and let me say that my nickname in French class was “Je ne sais pas” because that was my daily answer to any of the teacher’s questions. I’ve spent a total of 4 weeks in Germany and I was able to say hello, goodbye, and one beer please by the time my vacation ended. I'm foreign language stupid

I picked Spanish, since I’ve never attempted.

So here was my day on Saturday August, 29, 2006

8:30 a.m. wakeup and realize my cell phone is dead. My roommate, Tamarina, had brought my phone charger home from work, but I couldn’t leave her a note asking her to leave out the cord since it would have been in English, so I drew this picture and left it for her to find when she woke up.


Seeing as she is a character on SF0.org, I was hoping she’d catch on that something was up. My friend that speaks Spanish very well decided to accompany me for the day and help me not get the crap kicked out of me.

10:00 a.m. I’m playing volleyball. Some people know about the website, and guess correctly that I’m doing a task. We are a fairly competitive group (and some would argue that I bring a lot of the competitiveness with me(which is why I keep an eye on the newly completed tasks to see if any were done better than what I did(such as when I posted for the 'We, The Horny' task and thought I had done quite a clever one only to be trumped immediately by Spotlight Skullshines’ post (Nut on this Kitty(dammit!))))) so everyone kept taking digs at me while I was playing and the best retort I could muster up was "el stupido burro". They were also nice enough to help me curse in Spanish when I messed up, which was quite a lot.

*side note, if you are playing barefoot cause it’s slick out and you roll your toes, “La Puta Madre” is no replacement for “GODDAMNMOTHERFUCKINGFUCKFUCKFUCK” while you are limping around trying to figure out if you had broken 10 or 12 of them, which didn't happen, but I was able to successfuly seperate an otherwise completely healthy nail from it's appendage.

2:00 Done playing and exhausted, we headed to the presidio bowling alley for some beers and burgers. Dos Cervezes, por favor. This is where, through limited Spanish and bad charades it only took me half an hour to say that something that takes me a minute in to say in English takes me 10 minutes to say in Spanish. Luckily I don’t know what irony is. Four beers into it, my back decides to let me know that I’ve hurt it. So now I’m an old, hobbling illiterate that can only ask for beers and and swear a single phrase. My friend keeps with it, though, and I start getting to the point where I can order a burrito and request black beans, beef, no guacamole.

…Por favor…

8:30 p.m. So we relax for a few hours, shower, drink more cervezas, and head to the mission for burritos and cervezas. We stopped at Doc’s Clock first to wet the whistle but the very fun shuffleboard table was taken. I ordered Dos Guiness, Por Favor, which took the bar tender about a minute to figure out what I was ordering and then who ignored us for the rest of the night until we finally left to drink elsewhere. We found a taqueria and proceded to eat. I had to call it a night after that, though, because my back kept spasming. Big night on the town, indeed.

I was actually quite surprised by the number of words I had picked up during my life in the midwest – like counting to 10. All in all, I wouldn’t do this task again if I was paid to. Unless, of course, I was paid in beer, er, cervezas.