An excerpt from the book, "Shuffle", by Wendall Woodall

The following is an excerpt from the book "Shuffle" by Wendall "Windy" Woodall.  Windy was an Assemblies of God missionary to Honduras.  After returning to the US, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease.  The book "Shuffle" is really about his adjustment to life with Parkinson's, but, as you will see, he uses some pretty funny stories from the mission field as well!!
Well, here is Windy's take on arriving in San José for language school:

In the summer of 1990, we packed up our whole family and moved to San José, Costa Rica. Cheryl and I were both still in our twenties, and our first two daughters were three and two. Our mission? To make sure our kids lived as far away from their grandparents as possible. That’s not actually true, but we were certainly accused of it a time or two. The real assignment was to spend three trimesters at a Spanish language school in San José that had a reputation for producing fluent speakers within a year. For my wife, who grew up in places like Miami, Southern California, and the border of Texas and Mexico, it was about fine-tuning her phonetics and adding to her limited vocabulary. For me, it was more about being torn limb-from-limb linguistically fine-tuning her phonetics and adding to her limited vocabulary. For me, it was more about being torn limb-from-limb linguistically speaking, crushing my self-esteem to nothing more than dust, and then rebuilding me from scratch—one agonizing verb conjugation at a time. I remember the speech the school’s director gave on the very first day of classes. With a cheery smile, he said: “Welcome to the Spanish Language Institute. And those will be the last words that we speak to you in English this year.” By noon that same day, we were called down to the nursery area where our oldest daughter, Brittany, kept trying to climb over the fence, crying the whole time, “I don’t know what they’re saying to me.” My wife tried to get Brittany down. I tried to climb over the fence with her. It was a long year for all of us. Looking back now, I can say that it was one of the most humbling periods of my life. For the next twelve months, we became like elementary school children again: we pronounced our vowels and consonants out loud in class, tried to put embarrassingly simple sentences together on command, took vocabulary tests every day, put signs on everything in the classroom and at home with the appropriate Spanish word for each item, planned for our show-and-tell presentations, and so on. All we seemed to be missing were the smiley face stickers on our papers and coloring pages. I watched many grown men and women break under the stress and strain of that year, and it seemed that the more education they had, the greater their collapse. Now, don’t misunderstand me here. Our teachers were as kind as they could possibly be. The problem was that some of the adults-turned-kids-again just could not handle being corrected day in and day out. They were used to getting things right, being in charge, teaching others how to do things—in short, they were used to being in control. We all felt things spiraling out of control that year. A young doctor from China was studying at the institute and attempted to encourage us. Spanish would be his seventh language to conquer, he explained, and he assured us that it got much easier on the third or fourth language. We told him he might need a doctor if he continued trying to cheer us up. It wasn’t just in the classroom that we were humbled, either. To help us learn the language more quickly, the agency that sent us used a total-immersion theory. From the moment we got off the plane, we were encouraged to start learning how to survive in the new culture on our own. Familiar faces did pick us up from the airport on the night we arrived, but we had to depend on public transportation that entire year at the institute. On the very first morning, I bravely decided to go out for food and hopped on an old, dilapidated bus that seemed to be headed in the right direction. I took a seat toward the middle, excited about my first adventure. Now, if you’ve never ridden a bus in Latin America, you won’t be able to grasp how I spent the next few hours. Without realizing it, I had luckily boarded the inbound bus just as it began its route from the outskirts toward downtown. There were plenty of seats, space, and air to breathe. That scenario was rather short-lived, however. At the next stop, at least thirty people got on the bus, which put us at what I thought was fairly close to capacity. I even got up to offer my seat to an elderly lady and joined the throngs standing in the aisles. Then, we hit the next stop where maybe five people got off and it seemed like another thirty got on. I could barely see out the windows because of the people, and I was at the dead center of this growing mass. At every stop, it only got worse. The few that got off the bus each time said the appropriate words to squeeze toward the doors. Some yelled out, “Parada!” to let the driver know that they needed out at the next stop, but I didn’t learn that term until days later. In fact, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t know any of the correct words or phrases—either to make the bus stop or to get the crowd to let me through—much less how to ask anyone the location of the nearest grocery store. At long last, a group of hot, sweaty people disembarked and carried me along with them. Truth be told, I think I was the only one sweating. They all immediately scattered in different directions. I was left standing on the corner with a second moment of insightful awareness: I didn’t know where I was, and, worse, I didn’t know how to tell anyone where I needed to go to get home. Several hours later, I did arrive back at our rental house, primarily due to the kindness and broken English of a few Costa Ricans I met along the way. My lovely wife opened the door, saw my disheveled hair and bewildered glaze, and spoke the words she sensed I needed to hear most: “Did you get milk?” Did I mention it was a humbling year? That same day, I had another brilliant idea. Thinking it would be best to avoid the bus routes for a while, at least until I knew the city and the language a little better, I borrowed a bicycle from another language school student who lived right down the street. I should have suspected there would be trouble when I pedaled off and he was shaking his head quietly behind me. There were nuances of driving in Latin America that I didn’t comprehend just yet. They do have traffic lights, stop signs, and speed limits, and most city roads mark the lanes with bright white and yellow paint—but all of these things are considered suggestions rather than hard and fast laws. Traffic cops were few and far between, and almost all of them were on foot. They were sure not going to chase down anybody who violated the rules. And another surprise awaited me: drivers love to blow their horns. My Honduran friends would later tell me that if you only had enough money to either fix the brakes or the horn, you always chose the latter. And, so, I ignorantly pedaled into this chaotic scene and noticed much too late that the volume of traffic was increasing rapidly around me. Then the two-lane road unexpectedly became a four-lane highway—and I use those terms loosely. That’s how many lanes were painted on the blacktop, but we easily had six or seven lanes squeezed into that tight space, and nobody was slowing down. Lines were suggestions, remember? And while I had heard horns blaring sporadically around me up until then, I was now in a cacophony of sound that was literally deafening.
I know what you’re probably thinking. I’m one of those people who shouldn’t be allowed to roam free without supervision anywhere on the planet. I might have come to that conclusion as well, had I had a spare moment, but there was no time. The four lanes became six officially—and closer to eight or nine unofficially—and that’s when I saw it: a huge roundabout. This was a huge, circular intersection, easily six lanes across, fed by four main highways that converged into one giant merry-go-round of merging traffic, complete with a giant statue of an undoubtedly important historical figure sitting on a concrete island right in the center of it all. I should have gotten his name, for he would become my constant companion for the next sixty minutes or so. I’m not exaggerating. I had been following hard on the bumper of a taxi driver who seemed to know where he was going, so when he darted toward the innermost circle of the roundabout, I was on his tail. And then he deserted me, without so much as a beep of the horn in goodbye, shooting between cars to catch his exit about three-fourths of the way around the intersection. I was left behind to look for my own gap in a sea of bumper-to-bumper traffic. It was the scene right out of National Lampoon’s European Vacation when Chevy Chase gets on the roundabout with his family and circles for the rest of the day and into the night. But at least Chevy had a car. I can say this about my misfortune that day: I did feel closer to God. And He must have heard my prayers, because about an hour later a break in the traffic opened up that to my eyes was equivalent to the parting of the Red Sea. I raced across all six lanes, screaming at the top of my lungs, while right on my heels vehicles blared their horns. When I trudged through the door that afternoon, barely safe and sound but alive, I fell exhausted into a fetal position on the couch. My wife came in from the bedroom, where she had been busily unpacking our suitcases and boxes all day, and said, “So, did you get the milk?” I love that woman, but she was starting to get on my nerves. She did offer to walk the bicycle back to the neighbor’s house for me, though, and when she returned, she had a carton of milk in her hands. “Did you know there’s a little convenience store on the block right behind us?” she asked. “They call it a pulpería, or something like that. That’ll probably come in handy.” I ate my cereal dry that night. It was better than the humble pie.

Woodall, Wendall (2014-03-25). Shuffle: A Way Forward, Whatever the Challenge (pp. 36-37). Highway 51 Publishing, LLC. Kindle Edition.