UN pensamiento...believe it or not

My memory of things that happen in Spanish is fragmented and unreliable. I find that when I’m recounting what someone said in Spanish later in English, I put into their mouths things I think they would say in English without really thinking about it. Automatic translation, taking into account facial expression, words, tone of voice. It’s really quite amazing, if not a bit unreliable. Perhaps not so much with the woman, except I promptly forgot after she told me how long she’d lived in the building, substituting instead “a long time.” A more potent example would be last night, when I was hanging out at a café/bar for several hours, (a “Spanish meal”) with two Spaniards and a girl from the Netherlands. Maybe it was just the feeling I got from the night, from the company, and from the stories (in English) I told about it after, but it seems that I was constructing these foreign friends into something I could understand better in my head. I only have a vague concept of conversation conventions and cultural norms in Spain, but by putting English words into their mouths they become something that’s not so different to me. Not so mysterious. And we get along just fine.