Well, it went all right. They asked exactly ONE of the questions that I'd prepared for - about my future plans - but it went okay nonetheless. I got hung up on the questions about 'what would you tell someone else coming to study here', but it wasn't because of my Spanish; it was because I simply couldn't think of anything except 'keep an open mind', even in English. I mean, what do you advise someone coming to Holland? You can tell them all kinds of things ABOUT the country, sure, but country-specific advice? No effing clue.

And then they found out about the English Channel and my Key West swim and that was all they wanted to talk about, which was nice on one hand, since it was stuff I knew about, and bad on the other, since I hadn't really prepared any vocabulary for it. But I only slipped into Dutch twice, once when I used Spanish words in Dutch word order (and started laughing and said, 'Estoy usando la orden del Holandes!') and once when I stopped monitoring myself and started speaking a little faster and ended up saying 'na' for 'after' (which Peter immediately called me on, upon which I clapped my hand over my mouth and blurted 'despues de!' and kept going).

The bottom line is that I think I spoke pretty fluently overall and was able to circumlocute when I didn't know something, but I did make a few dumb mistakes, like forgetting the 'me' in front of 'duelen' (to hurt) when I was talking about my Key West shoulders, and having a mental block and only being able to think of the Dutch word for 'older' and so having to backtrack and flip my comment around and use 'younger' instead. ('Mayor', damn it, 'mayor'! Duh!)

Anyway, I know they were testing us to see if we'd mastered all the tenses, and I know I used present, gerund, present perfect, both past tenses, and the conditional once or twice, but I also know that I did NOT use the imperfect subjunctive even once, nor the past perfect, simply because I didn't need them. I had decided to not think analytically about it and just to use whatever tense I felt was appropriate for the question, rather than 'forcing' weird tenses into the mix, but I'm still a bit unsure about how they saw my performance (especially about my preterite versus imperfect stuff, which I never used to have problems with but which I for some reason mix up nowadays).

Anyway, I'll shut up now, but this was thirty percent of my final grade, which is why I'm stressing. I'm guessing I got somewhere around a 25 out of 30 points, but considering we have a couple of really poor speakers to lower the curve, it could be higher - in which case I would be ecstatic. I guess I'll find out on Friday.