Oh Caaaanada...!

Overnight flights always seem like a good idea. You board a plane, go to sleep, and when you wake up, you're there!

But it's not like that. Instead, the smells, lights, noise and uncomfortable seating keep you wide awake, often all night, so you arrive completely exhausted.... which is how we were yesterday morning, when touching down at Lester B. Pearson International Airport after our all-nighter from Santiago.

Despite this, we were all very happy to be back at home, and no one more than Carmen, who spontaneously broke into song as we walked from the plane to Terminal 1 (Her song? "Oh Canada"... .yup, I am not kidding.)

One of the things that struck me about being back home is Canada's... bigness. Compared to Santiago's Arturo Merino Benitez Airport, Pearson is HUGE.

Once we got out on the 401 the roads, too, seemed so wide, the houses so tall, the sky so broad. Because from the ocean to the mountains Chile is only about 350 kilometres wide, everything there seems to have been made to fit those narrow parameters.

(That of course is not to say that Chile does not have its own bigness. As I've mentioned before, Chile's mountains are breathtaking... and that's another thing the kids and I noticed as we headed home from the airport -- no mountains in the GTA! Chile's oceans, too, are endless.)

But back to our return, as Peter drove us home, I felt so... relieved. We had made it back! Safely! Despite living in a huge city (a first for my kids), being immersed in a completely different language and environment, and having experienced one of the biggest earthquakes in Chile's history, we were fine.

Actually, some of us were more than fine. As Nicholas spoke on the phone with one of his friends yesterday afternoon, I overheard him say the whole experience had been "awesome."  Of my two kids, Nick was the one who enjoyed Chile the most. He loved Chilean school, asked the most questions about Chile's history and culture, made a couple of really good Chilean friends, and learned the most Spanish.

Carmen had a harder time. She found school boring, and this was mainly because she could not understand her teachers. She didn't make any close friends and compared to Nick, she probably knows about three quarters of the Spanish he does.

So, how much Spanish do Nick and Carmen know? After all, this was the main reason for our trip.

They know a lot, but are they now tri-lingual, if one counts their years of French immersion in there as well? No, they are not.

I thought that three months would be enough for them to learn a new language but I was completely wrong. Nick and Carmen can for sure carry on a simple conversation in Spanish. They also understand quite a bit, but many times cannot answer back.

I realized how hard learning Spanish was for them when Carmen was preparing a presentation for one of her classes in school, and she struggled with verb conjugations. I'd somehow forgotten that all verbs have a past, a present and a future, and this is something that takes years to learn, in any language.

So that Nick and Carmen don't lose the Spanish they did learn, I plan to continue speaking Spanish to them at home; we'll probably go back to Chile in a few years; I also want them to do a proper, school-sanctioned student exchange at some point; and for them to maybe take Spanish classes in high school and university.

That way, maybe in a few years they will be able to conjugate those Spanish verbs, and switch easily between English and Spanish, just like that flight attendant in our Air Canada plane, who not only spoke flawless English and Spanish all night (but also French.... and Portuguese!).

The way I see it now, our last three months were just a start....