muy bueno!
Riding home on the bus, someone got on and started talking to the person sitting next to me. I tried to offer her my seat, but she declined. They conversed in Spanish.

And I understood it. Sort of.

Maybe half of it based on contextual clues, probably only a fifth of it from the words. But aside from a few interstitial sentences that made no sense to me, I caught the gist of the conversations. It probably helps that one of the people was interjecting English words now and then, which may imply a non-native speaker, which may imply the use of much simpler words, but it pleased me. The first stage of learning a spoken language is finding enough patterns to discern the meaning. Being able to hold a conversation comes much later.

First one of them described the casual car pool to SF, and that it was free. The other asked why, and the tolls were mentioned (free passage if you are driving a HOV). It doesn't run on Saturday, Sunday, or federal holidays. After a while they started to mock the woman who was eating greasy and noxious smelling chicken (I mostly caught the mood and "pollo" here, alas). Then they passed a local Mexican place and said it was muy bueno, fresca, and one of them said something about a scallop dish there, which was good but expensive.

Most excellent! If Bush declares martial law, I will at least have a vague chance of understanding people across the border. (I assume Canada will build large walls to keep us out) I may not be able to speak well enough to do more than order food, but that will keep me going long enough for a crash course in the language. In any case: yeah!