[Taken from my blog at madridmemories.wordpress.com].
Hi! No theme to the blog post this week, just a few anecdotes and things I’ve done since last time…
This semester I’ve started to get more involved in ESN (Erasmus Student Network) activities, as I didn’t do many last semester for various reasons. Since Christmas, I’ve been on a tour of central Madrid, been to a language exchange, and joined Social Erasmus (the charitable sector) one January evening, when we looked for homeless people (not that hard to find, sadly) and gave them soup and bread. Cue anecdote number 1: One old man protested in English “no more chicken soup, no more chicken soup!”, and, when we offered him bread “no more bread, no more bread!” Feeling friendly, I asked him “¿y qué te gusta comer?” (“and what do you like to eat?”) to which he responded “quiero comer tus carnes” (“I want to eat your meats”) and claimed that he was only being honest and that he wanted to eat me. This was amusing to me and others in the group, but also a bit unsettling. Not that I’m complaining; it’s the closest I’ve had to romance in ages.
I’ve done a little bit of au pairing and have spent time with lots of younger cousins in my life so am not too scared of children, but occasionally you have a run-in with one – or three run-ins within half an hour. The other day, I was just INNOCENTLY standing in Burger King waiting for my MenĂş de Nuggets (Nugget Meal) with my hand on the counter, when a small child decided to jump up onto the bar with NO consideration for the fact that my hand was being crushed by hers. Then as I opened the door and left, a smaller child nearly followed me out into the street so I had to stop to make sure his parent/guardian stopped him. To top it off, I was nearly home from Burger King when I walked past a GANG of youths – ok, a group of 12-year-olds, but they’re scarier in large numbers. As I passed them, I heard one of the kids shout – in English with a thick Spanish accent – “Hello brother. I’m black.” At first I thought they were talking to me but then I realised that I’m not black, and neither were any of them, so I don’t think they were talking to me after all. Maybe practising the vocab they’d learnt at school?
Post office interlude: I went to one of the few post offices that opens past 2pm on a Saturday thinking they would have international stamps but they didn’t and apparently I should get them from a tobacconist. Good old post office.
I’ve had a linguistic faux pas or two these past couple of weeks as well. Firstly, I was all ready to say my “gracias” to the cashier in a shop when he mixed up the routine by saying “tu ticket está en la bolsa, ¿vale?” (“your receipt is in the bag, OK?”) and my “gracias” tried to become a “vale” and ended up as a nice hybrid “gra-le”. The second issue must have seemed even weirder to the person listening. I was chatting to someone when he asked me if I liked “mariscos” (shellfish), so, having had this same conversation with somebody else only a few days previously, I confidently replied “no tanto, pero el pescado me gusta” (“not that much, but I like fish”). So far, so good. The only problem was, I later realised that the topics of conversation leading up to that question had not been food, or the sea. They had been race and ethnicity. So he might possibly have actually been asking me whether I liked “Moriscos” (Moors – the Muslims who migrated to Spain from Africa many centuries ago). Let’s just re-cap:
“Do you like the Muslims who came to Spain?”
“Not that much, but I like fish.”
Let’s just hold on to the hope that it was a seafood based conversation after all.
Bye for now!