While Marina and I are away for the week, we’ve turned over the blog to veteran Notes from Spain contributor and guest blogger Gary Child, who was recently let loose for a fortnight in Barcelona. In this third instalment, The Joy of Intercambios…

It is peculiar to this day and age that everyone has the potential to put themselves in contact with complete strangers, and enter into a mutually beneficial relationship, at the click of a mouse. I refer to the intercambio and not the numerous nefarious activities which, allegedly, take place with the assistance of modern technology.

My mother would have a fit. I can hear her now:

“You’re what!? You’re going to travel to a foreign country, full of foreigners, and meet a complete stranger, a foreigner, in a bar, a foreign bar, in a foreign city you barely know? What for? You’re just going to talk? Talk!? Don’t come running to me if you end up in the gutter with your throat slit, your wallet gone and your passport being sold on the black market..!”

Just as well I didn’t tell her then, eh?

Intercambios, I have discovered to my great delight, are a wonderful thing. So much so that I have elected to dip my arranged classes in the afternoons and do intercambios instead. Invisible Ruben and the star crossed lovers wont notice I’m not there, which leaves the lovely Laura having a one to one with the teacher. Everybody wins.

There is, apparently, misconception that intercambios are what you do when you move to live in a country for a period to learn the language. I suppose I was concerned that this might be the case. But, no, it seems that the Spanish are keen to speak to a wide sample of us native English speakers to experience the whole breadth and depth of our mispronunciation and mangling of our mother tongue.

So much so, in fact, that I have needed to be careful to try to make sure all respondents get a slice of the cake, so to speak. What’s the best way to go about arranging intercambios? In short I have no idea but what follows has worked for me:

How do I make contact?

This would be nigh on impossible without the internet. Access to the web and an email address are an absolute must. The websites I used were talkconmigo.com and loquo.com. I started about a fortnight before I was due to travel as people, by and large, can’t plan reliably much further ahead.

Talkconmigo.com is specific to Barcelona. You register and open a free account with a user name a password and your email address, if you are aesthetically pleasing you could upload an image of yourself. I didn’t bother. Draw your own conclusions.

Next, you select the kind of people with whom you might like to converse. Options include only males, only females, both males and females, as well as being able to select an age group. So I clicked for the anybody over 45 option. Being seen chatting with a pretty young thing in her 20’s would, I am sure, be very good for my ego but we’d certainly have little or nothing in common about which to talk.

Okay, once you have clicked the Submit button, the database produces a list of potential victims and then it’s up to you to click on the ones you wish to contact. I typed a little about me and my availability in to the first person’s contact box, then copied it and pasted it into each subsequent victim’s contact box, and sat back to await the responses.

All correspondence takes place via the site. Talkconmigo.com protects your email address and emails you with a link to let you know when someone has responded. It’s a bit like being a kid again, waiting for the postman to come at Christmas and birthdays.

Loquo.com covers the whole of Spain so you need to select a town. Again you need to open an account, etc., and again you get the option to protect your email address from public view. The section you want is under Community and is called Language Exchange. Click the place your listing link and the rest is plain sailing, paste your details in like before, click Submit and wait for the fun to start.

With Loquo.com the listings are organized with the newest posts at the top so gradually your posting will drop down the lists. After 60 days the post is deleted but you can elect to stop it whenever you want. I posted on two consecutive days.

IMPORTANT: If you are only available for say a week or two it’s a must that you make this clear in the info you post. Further, if you are only available at certain times when you are in situe it’s worth pointing this out as well. In the end I created an online calendar. I used iCal because I have an account with .Mac but Google do a perfectly adequate online calendar that’s free. Make sure all your correspondents have a link to the calendar and as each appointment comes make sure you update it. This allows people to browse your horario before they get in contact and saves a lot of to-ing and fro-ing to negotiate times.

So, I’ve received some responses. What next…?

Well, good manners dictates that you reply as quickly as practical. At this early stage an agreement in principle that you will meet and that the fine details can be sorted out later is probably sufficient. Subsequent meetings can be arranged once you find out whether you can stand each other’s company. Luckily I have managed to secure re-bookings, so to speak. Closer to the time you will need to get down to the nitty gritty of the where and the when. There are pitfalls here…

Metro entrances are good places to meet if your target city has a Metro. Except that most Metro stations have at least two, more likely three or four, entrances. Forero Pepino and I discovered this in Sol, in Madrid, earlier this year whilst attending the GME. Having agreed to meet at the Metro in Sol to go for a beer, we spent fifteen minutes sorting out where one and other were. Bear in mind (spot the Madrid pun here?) we both had mobiles, both had each others’ numbers and both more or less speak the same language!

Tourist attractions are a double-edged sword. They are easy to find but will likely be crawling with people - tourists. One guiri probably looks like every other guiri in a seething mass of cameras, rucksacks, shorts sandals and sunburn.

Bars and cafes are good places to meet. Best let your ‘local’ chose a suitable bar, but make sure you get the name of the plaza or street too. I can’t imagine it would be much fun standing alone in bars of the same name in barrios several Metro stops apart. Hopefully your contact will chose a suitable place, the Hard Rock Café isn’t particularly conducive to the discussion of the finer points of grammar.

Parks and gardens are another option fraught with danger, especially when faced with endless paths, statues and monuments carefully designed to look alike to the foreign eye. It took me twenty minutes to feel my way back to the hidden Metro station in Madrid’s Retiro park, I walked past it twice for Pete’s sake!

The Spanish stereotype suggests that as a nation the Spanish are invariably late, but this has not been my experience, so be on time.

Okay, we found each other, now what…?

Enjoy the experience. You are both there to help each other. Agree to start in one language and change over at some point to the other. Quick interjections for correction of tenses, vocab and the like are okay, particularly when your partner is stumbling. But don’t continually interrupt with long explanations or your new found friend may get brassed off, glance at his watch a few times and suddenly remember a third cousin’s saints day he needed to attend.

A good thing to do is to be prepared with a piece of paper and jot down points that you need to bring up and review at the end of the session or when you switch languages.

Be prepared to talk about yourself, your family, likes and dislikes, pets, hobbies, politics, sport, your house, your town, the monarchy, taxes, anything goes. Do ask questions and show an interest in your host’s experiences and opinions and remember to listen carefully when he is talking.

If you are going to do more than one intercambio in the day try to leave yourself a couple of hours to relax and ‘come down’ between sessions; maybe take a shower, have a meal, read a little in English, etc. to clear your head and be fresh for your next victim.

Intercambios are mentally exhausting, an hour in each language is probably enough. Some of your hosts will be experienced at the art of the intercambio and lead you effortlessly through the whole process, some will be harder work and you will have to do the spadework. In either case you will come out at the other end with a feeling of well being, satisfied that you have made a connection at some level with another culture in a language that is not your own.

So, how was it for you…?

Up to now I have partnered with four individuals; two are teachers of Spanish as a second language, one is a primary school teacher and one a photographer. All of them are delightful people; helpful, happy to practice their English and, in return, to help me unlock the mysteries of their own native tongue.

My old French teacher insisted that learning a language was not difficult. After all, he maintained, even the dimmest of French people manage to learn French. And now I know that, in a way, he was right because even the dim and dopey live one long intercambio. Learning a language as we did with him by turning to page 17 and parroting an exercise on irregular verbs can be a soul destroying experience.

I know in my heart of hearts that there has to be the bookwork, particularly when there is little or no access to native speakers of your target language. The relationship between the hard grind of the bookwork and the intercambio might be likened to that of the climbing of the north face of the Eiger and hang gliding off the top. Weeks of planning and hard work for an hour or so soaring like a bird.

I thoroughly recommend the experience to all!

When not living it up in Barcelona, Gary Child works on great Free educational resources for the Primary classroom.