Spanish smiles
In Spain the tooth fairy is a small mouse called Pérez, or Ratoncito Pérez.
Instead coming from a cabbage patch, the stork brings Spanish babies from Paris.
The most common tea label in Spain is called ´Hornimans´
One of my English students was explaining the phrasal verb ´to try on´ and suggested that he went to the store and tried on a suitcase. What makes it funnier is that for a Spanish speaking person the most natural pronunciation of the word suit is sweet.
I still find the Spanish ´rr´ sound next to impossible to pronounce. I could probably stand in front of a mirror and pretend to be a motor for hours and still pitifully roll my double r. To help me one of my friends suggested to me that it is just like the English pronunciation of the word RRRRabit.
The surprise of my roommate David when he came one morning and saw that I had put a wanted poster for him on the kitchen door to remind him it was his turn to clean two weeks ago.
When you are in a bar and request a song at 4a.m. and the d.j. tells you it is too early to play it.
Trying to understand the cultural differences in Spain, when I ask why they do things a certain way the most common answer seems to be ´Spain is different´, a former tourism slogan. However when I start to explain some of things that we do in Canada I get the impression sometimes that they think ´Canadians are crazy´
Today I am celebrating seven months in Spain.
1 comment:
Hi Katie:
Your blog is a delight.
The sheer volume of it is intimidating; I just got up, but now I already feel like taking a break.
Your activity level is also crazy. Good for you; now is the time, before other pressures suck up your time and limit your moveability.
I get nostalgic and can resurrect pleasant memories thinking back to being your age. I was never one for noticing what was odd about things at 4 am; but I remember the general feeling.
A friend came to visit last week for dinner. We met on primary flying training at Gimli when I was 21 (and dinosaurs walked the earth), and have kept up an acquaintanceship ever since.
He is a pack rat, and brought some letters and postcards that I had written to him way back a long time ago. It was really odd to revisit little snippets of the detail of my young life: and I guess this is a lesson about blogs and diaries.
What was odd, or rather, revealling, is that in some ways I am so much the same, even though so much is so different. What an illumination.
Hope your blog material will survive, so as to enrich your older life. Digital stuff is much more fragile, by the way, than paper.
Reading between the lines -- I really hope that you are not letting your male roommates treat you like a "Mom" or a servant/cleaner. It is a common problem with post-adolescent men, who somehow think they can live like they did in Mommy and Daddy's house.
Don't let them get away with it.
This issue is what drove me out of communal/shared homes; I just got tired of putting up with lazy irresponsible slobs. And I'm not alone.
When young men live together, they often have the aesthetic sensibility of bears living in a cave.
Great stuff; great fun.
Ken
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