Español...we meet again

Tonight, I went in for a Spanish level assessment. At the end of the session, the Spanish teacher says to me, "Wow Vivienne, you've got great conversational skills. You speak so fast and I'd definitely put you in a level 3 class...Except that you speak a LOT of Portuguese." Merp.
This, of course, I suspected. During a game of Spanish Taboo I'm trying to get the other participants to guess the word "ribs" and I'm screaming "los ossos!" which means "bones" in Portuguese, and "bears" in Spanish. Needless to say, they had no idea why I had bears on my body.
Having minored in Spanish in college, I'm a little bummed that I have to take a step backwards and "re-learn" even the basics.
The Portuguese I've spent the last two years speaking has warped my Spanish pronunciation and vocab, just as it occurred the other way around when I was first learning Portuguese in Moz.
"Obrigada" comes out more naturally than "gracias" and well, a lot of the time, I don't even know if the words tumbling out of my mouth are Spanish, Portuguese, or a mix of both.
So I'm commencing a rigorous training program to get back to Spanish because, let's face it, Spanish is what I'll be speaking in Southern California.
But at the same time, I'm terrified of losing my Portuguese. As much as it's helped me- building Portuguese on top of Spanish- because they are so similar, the flip-side is that, um, they're so damn similar.  And to lose my Portuguese would be like losing a huge part of my Peace Corps experience.
To top it all off, I'm starting a French class tomorrow. Can I juggle so many foreign languages, use them effectively, and continue to learn and improve in each of them?  In a way, it's like re-integrating into American culture while keeping all the lessons I learned in Mozambique.
The game here is balance. Now how do I find balance?

Float on

A friend of mine, Cameron, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania at around the same time I served in Moz. While catching up with a mutual friend of ours yesterday, I was told, "Whenever we stalked your pictures online, we always wondered why it looked like Cameron lived in a third world country but you just looked like you were on vacation!"
Haha well, the other PC programs didn't refer to us as "Beach Corps" for nothing.
And now, I look through the Facebook pictures documenting the glorious beach adventures of my friends still serving in Mozambique, and I get so nostalgic. Some days I'd give anything to be back on the beach, soaking in the heat of Africa instead of stressing about finding a job,
paying for a wedding, making rent this month, studying for the FSOT. America's so fast-paced and as the days fly by, I easily get wrapped up in these concepts of "progress" and "productivity." It's no wonder that despite all the luxuries available to us, we as a nation are still so unhappy.

I've  started eating those giant grocery store bananas again, and buying those tiny, expensive, mushy avocados. I won't even talk about how expensive mangoes are here.
I've started driving again, and going to the gym.
I still don't know any of my next door neighbors.
I guess it's all a part of being American.

I move on to another day, 
to a whole new town with a whole new way
Went to the porch to have a thought,
Got to the door and again, I couldn't stop 
You don't know where and you don't know when, 
But you've still got your words and you got your friends 
Walk along to another day,
Work a little harder, work another way 
Well uh-uh baby I ain't got no plan, 
We'll float on maybe, would you understand? 
Gonna float on maybe, would you understand? 
Well float on maybe, would you understand?

- Modest Mouse, "World At Large"