his morning, Magdalena took me with her to run errands. As we walk together, she tells me the Spanish word for whatever is in front of us, so that our conversations end up like this.

Magdalena: [pointing to apples in the grocery story] Esta es "manzana."
Sarah: Man -- que?
Magdalena: Manzana. Frutas.
Sarah: Esta es manzana. Frutas. Si.
Magdalena: Si?
Sarah: Si.

We go to Banco del Pacifico, and Lionel Richie's "Say You, Say Me" comes on. I haven't heard the song in maybe 10 years, and the lines make me giggle: "I had a dream / I had an awesome dream / People in the park / Playing games in the dark." But looking at this line of Ecuadorians, on my first morning in South America, I am seized by the notion that THIS is what Lionel Richie is singing about. Say you, say me. Standing in this line, I am two continents bridged, two foreign cultures suddenly touching. And I want very badly for everyone in the line to start singing at once: "Say it together / That's the way it should be." I am so giddy about Ecuadorians singing one of Lionel Richie's most cloying hits that I am laughing out loud by the time Magdalena finishes with her transaction. She looks at me cock-eyed, but soon her attention is snagged: "Autobus," she tells me, and I parrot it back to her.
At one, I go to my first class at the Spanish school with Zulma, my teacher. We play a game of hangman, but my vocabulary is so bad I don't even know the words she's trying to spell, so I can only make blind guesses.
"S?"
"No."
"T?"
"No."
I'm like someone illiterate playing Wheel of Fortune. You've got AMER_CA, and they're guessing "P? W? O?"
When we switch places, I thumb through the Spanish dictionary and give her the hardest word I can find: Spanish for electroplating. She gets it on the last try.
Later, I'm at an Internet cafe, grumpy over the slow connection and the computer's Spanish directions, when Lauryn Hill's "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You" comes on. It starts with the man behind the counter. Then a couple of the guys at computers start humming, and pretty soon, close to everyone in the place is singing the song: "I need you baby / And if it's quite all right, I need you baby / To warm the lonely nights." And I can't believe it, that my singing fantasy from the morning is coming true, albeit in a far more casual, less surreal manner. And I walk into the night, happy and excited, and then I quickly get lost.