Amongst my friends, I am not known for my quick reactions. Even a simple question like "Would you like a cup of tea" has a surprisingly delayed response (well to my friends anyway).

It has earned me years of jokes at my expense, including the presentation of a plastic replica of the cartoon dog Pluto on my 21st birthday (because I am on another planet, geddit?!)

So playing a card game which required me to slap my hand down whenever I saw a matching card was never going to be my forte. I invariably was the last hand on a pile, several seconds after everyone else.

Unfortunately the sensation seemed to match the whole evening.

I was out with a group of Liliana's friends for some drinks, chat and games, and had been looking forward to the chance to fit myself in further with life and friendships here.

Liliana is one of my teachers, who I clicked with at our first lesson. With her, Spanish hasn't seemed such an obstacle, as I felt at ease to chat with her about anything that came into my head.

But suddenly that all seemed irrelevant, as I scrambled to catch meanings as conversations raced past me. Jokes went over my head. Words crammed my brain. My tongue fell silent as I tried to keep up.

I suddenly realised how far I still have to go to communicate, to fit in with life and make friends. And as the night went on, my silence weighed down on me, pushing me further out of play.

I was amongst a hubbub of chatter and laughter, which reminded me of nights out with friends in London, but I suddenly felt lonely.

Bells every 45 minutes, corridors full of classrooms, rucksacks overladen with exercise books, homework that is never quite completed. Yes after an interval of 14 years, I am back at school. Thankfully it hasn't been accompanied by my voice returning to soprano pitch, having to play rugby on freezing cold pitches, or becoming dreadfully insecure in front of girls.

I have just finished my first week at the Maryknoll Language Institute in Cochabamba, where I will be for 6 weeks improving my spanish before I start my voluntary work in La Paz. It is a pretty intense course with four hours of one-to-one tuition every day plus lots of homework using videos, tapes, and reading material.   I try my best to get my teachers to just chat and ignore my grammatical errors but they are too good to let me get away with it.

The institute was set up mainly for Catholic missionaries, but I have managed to sneak in thanks to my past work at CAFOD. In fact at times it quite reminds me of CAFOD with its liberal, religious bent. Thursday saw an Earth Day celebration, which had some great hippy elements in the liturgy. On Friday, we watched a play by some talented local students drawing on chronicles of the conquistadores and sacred indigenous texts. And as you can imagine, Ratzinger's election as Pope Benedict wasn't greeted with great joy by my fellow students.

Anyway, enough wittering. Better head back and work on my subjunctive.

So I headed to the equivalent of 'Speakers Corner' in the central square, where a a speaker dressed entirely in black with over-sized sunglasses seemed to be successfully rowsing a crowd with his explanation of 'hydrocarbon' laws. I couldn't quite see it happening in Hyde Park.

I lingered at the edge and then asked a neighbour about what he thought would happen at Congress when it came to the vote (due later that day) on how much royalties should be applied on gas.  Soon it was me that had drawn a crowd as lots of Bolivians surrounded me to passionately explain why the bloqueos (road blocks) were justified, how neo-liberalism lay at the heart of Bolivia's problems, and the need for an indigenous-type of development that was different to traditional left-right politics.

At least, I think that's what they said. Passionate tends to mean speaking fast - so I soon had this stream of words rushing past my ear. I could pick up the occasional words and sentences, but then the next few sentences would bypass me completely. It was like trying to listen to a radio, where you can only occasionally get good reception but often are trying to make out words through static.

At times, I would tune out completely.

Tuning out didn't stop my nodding and saying "mmm" and "siii", perhaps more to assure myself I'd understood. It was at these times, that invariably people would say something like "Do you understand?"  I normally lie at these moments and say yes, just so that I don't look like some insane puppet that nods his head for no apparent reason.

In the evening, it was my time to talk. I joined a couple of Uruguayans for a few beers. Alcohol is certainly good for encouraging you to talk but unfortunately it didn't quite make up for my linguistic inadequacies. We had a long conversation that rambled over lots of interesting topics: identity, culture, Bolivian politics, Uruguay, Galeano, travelling.

Frequently I would launch confidently into a sentence only to get near to the end of the sentence to find I was missing a key bit of vocabulary. So I would reverse, and try another sentence to see if that came out ok. I felt like I was exploring Cochabamba's one-way system in a car for the first time. Throughout our conversation, I would be tripping up over tenses and clauses and skidding over subjunctives.

At 11pm, I felt completely exhausted by my total immersion in Spanish. I headed to bed and dreamed (in English) that I was back in England driving a clapped out car through central London's one-way streets with a dodgy radio for company.