Category: Spanish Language

I eat, I sleep, I suffer

Post by Wynette: For the past year, I’ve been studying Spanish and found a great podcast/website that provides listening practice:  notesinspanish.com

It is done by a delightful young couple who live here in Madrid.  Ben is originally from England and Marina is from Madrid. In one of their conversations for listening practice they mention how people in Spain like to complain. (Charlie and I have been trying to write a song about that, maybe fitting in the word “plain” somewhere, but haven’t come up with much yet.)

When we were in Cadaques we found a little bar that served great coffee so we went there several times.  On one visit the woman behind the counter greeted us with a warm hola, took our order for dos cafe con leche, served us our coffee, then carried on her conversation with the only other person in the bar.  She was talking loudly in the small room so I was getting in some good listening practice.  I heard her say “Como, duermo, y … nada mas”.  I think she was saying, “I eat, I sleep, and nothing else.”  Then I heard her say “Yo sufro”, which means, “I suffer”.  Too bad I didn’t get many of the details.  I was thinking she might have been talking with her boss.  I hope she was just complaining and didn’t really live such a terrible life.

 

Foreign Languages

Wynette and I are in a foreign country, and I don’t mean Spain. It is hard to understand the signs. The menus are especially hard since they seem to have a language of their own. You see a different national flag.

I am speaking, of course, of Catalonia and Catalan. Many signs are only in Catalan, which seems to be a mixture of Spanish, French, and Italian, and maybe some Basque, who knows. The words have lots of Xx and double Ls. Often there are cognates with Spanish but they seem to be far enough off to be hard to get. We learned the Spanish menu words but they are useless for Catalan and often the dishes are something like partridge Catalan anyway which doesn’t give you much information.

The desk clerk at the hotel in Barcelona said that the schools teach only in Catalan. English and Spanish are taught as foreign languages. She wants her son to be a native Spanish speaker so he can easily live anywhere in Spain, so she has to work extra with him in Spanish.

I still have some high-school French so sometimes I am better at guessing the words than Wynette with her Spanish.

Santa Caterina Market 2

They had whole booths for eggs:

The goose eggs (at the far left) were pretty big but then we ran across this one:

These are ostrich eggs, only 28 euro each.

The market is mostly fresh food but they had deli stuff also. We plan to make a picnic tomorrow from there. Today we ate at a little cafe in the market. It was very good. They say Barcelona is a foodie town, that seems to be true.

We sat right by the cooks, this guy was friendly and was making jokes with us and took the above picture. He was the grill cook; to the left was the station for the guy who did things in frying pans and pots.

Notice the writing above on the back of his shirt, menjar i beure.  Those of you who know some Spanish know that that is not Spanish. It is a good example of Catalan.  Google Translate tells us it means “food and drink”.