Language Barriers/Dinner with Neighbors (Deborah)

Our neighbors, David (pronounced Dah-veed) and Rema 

We have met a few neighbors, and have gotten to know the ones next door a little more (father, mother, 13-yr. old son, 23-yr. old daughter). They have walked with us to show us a mall, flea market, post office, etc., made us an herbal tea for our coughs,  and have been very helpful answering many questions.

We have, however, had some miscommunications/misunderstandings on a few occasions. Here's one in particular. We invited them over to eat a week ago on  Saturday night at 7:00. We'd been told people in Barcelona typically eat the evening meal later, so we're thinking 7:00's pretty late, right? So I prepare the meal and I'm ready, and then we wait, but they're not here--no problemo, it's just 7:15. Then 7:30, 7:45, then I say to Jim, should we go knock on their door? Well that seems a little rude, like hey--would ya hurry up--you're late! Then we figure maybe they forgot, but hear guests of theirs leaving their apartment, so we're just not sure. But then we decide we'll just go ahead and eat--it's 8:00. Then we get a knock at our door at 8:15 (it's just the father, mother, and son). I/we try to communicate we're sorry we already ate, and it's no problem to heat up rest of food, like 5 minutes. But they seem to say they ate a late lunch and are full. We wonder if they're just being polite, don't want to eat in front of us. We may never know for sure. So then we get out the dessert--at least we can serve that to them.

We end up showing them a few "simple-to-teach" games we had brought from home. They were both just 2 person games, so we took turns playing each other, and they seemed to really enjoy that. We did too. We tried conversing some and usually it was successful, especially with Josiah's and Kathryn's help. And sometimes there would be facial expressions or short phrases that we'd understand and we had fun laughing with each other. It was an enjoyable evening.

Then they had us over for dinner this past Saturday night. We arrived 15 minutes late and it seemed we were early for sure. But we were served a wonderful Moroccan meal (where she is from), and enjoyed eating and conversing with them (using the help of all 3 of my translators: Josiah, Kathryn, and my electronic one).  They even seem to get excited when I say a more complicated sentence in Spanish.  Their encouragement and help makes the language barriers bearable.