I'm the smart one

C, a Swedish student at Antioch College who has been in Belgrade one day more than me has started working in the WiB office. She was already frustrated at her last internship place & decided to join us.

It's nice to have someone to speak in English with, although that might be bad for my language learning.

We have decided to eat lunch together every day. In search of salad ingredients, we went to Belgrade's central open air market, conveniently across the street from the office.

I haven't liked going to the market very much because of my limited Serbian. I hand people bills bigger than what the item could cost and rely on their honesty. Today it all clicked. I recognized the words that people said - granted they were only greetings and numbers. I was able to ask for mushrooms by name. I even asked for half a kilo of spinach grammatically correctly. C's Serbian is less developed than mine (apparently such a thing is possible) - I was able to interpret a bit for her. It felt like a breakthrough.

Maybe I will be able to speak this language someday.
(I'm starting classes on Monday.)