I am having a lot of fun here in N Spain armed with Aran’s first 10 lessons (thanks Kate). It is going well and the lessons are excellent. Listening to Spanish radio is a good way of tuning the brain in and every day one or two more words become recognizable. I am on lesson 3, at the moment I am going through each lesson twice before I move on. Two things I have picked up so far;
We are on a campsite where they speak good English; to stop them coming back to you it is necessary to try to appear confident with your Spanish, if you are at all hesitant they reply in English.
The other point I have discovered is how crucial the stress is; trying to buy a flag (bandera) I put the stress on the first syllable and got nowhere. Eventually the shop assistant worked it out and repeated it back with the stress on the penultimate syllable…it sounded quite different, no wonder I had confused her.
We went to Northern Spain several years ago and i really enjoyed trying out my tourist Spanish learnt from a bbc cassette and a phrase book… We stayed in Santender and travelled around on the local buses and always found someone to have a chat with. I found most people really patient with me and didn’t automatically revert back to English. Did struggle once with a bus driver who didn’t understand English and we were trying to make sure that there was a return bus (or something else important) and the only other person there was a lady who said she spoke Catalan not Spanish.
Yes…one lady said they spoke Catalan here when I said I was trying to learn Spanish…but in a very good natured way. One of the locals said that Catalan had a lot of French in it. There seem to be a lot of similarities running through the three languages…beach for example is playa, platja and plage in Spanish, Catalan and French (I think…I’m sure Aran will correct me if not).
Try answering them back in Welsh, that should do the trick…
Sounds as though you’re doing fantastically! 
I’m certainly having fun with it. Not sure about the locals tho…but they are very good and humour me.
Good tip re Responding in Welsh…the only Welsh I know is ‘eira bach, eira mawr’…old Welsh saying apparently courtesy of the Missus whose family hails from Bodelwyddan.
I would imagine that would do the trick to a T…