“ ¿A cuanto están?” I ask the younger of the two women standing behind a row of upturned crates piled with higos chumbo (prickly pears).
“MaMAAA,” she asks mama, even though they’ve been selling the things all morning, “¿A cuanto están?”
“Tres euros la cena,” replies mother in her gardening gloves as she expertly slices off the [...]
What would you do if someone gave you pumpkins? Soup them? Pie them? Put them away for Halloween? In Spain, you’d probably kick down a door and sulk. Dar calabazas a alguien, to give someone pumpkins, means to reject them, to turn them down. It used to be only hapless Don Juans who got the [...]
Animals ’speak’ different languages. An English dog responds to “Sit!” a Catalan dog to “¡Seu!” and a Spanish dog to the long-winded “¡Siéntate!” Of course, what they are responding to (or not, as the case may be) is the tone, not the word. My cats don’t care what I call them as long as I [...]
Valerie and Theresa on Andreu Buenafuente’s show on La Sexta (Spanish TV Channel 6) on 4 February.
The other day I went down the mountain to do some gestiones. Down the mountain. Bit of an exaggeration; Macharaviaya, the village where I live is only 240 metres above sea level, but it’s ten minutes of spiralling downhill bends to get to the coast, so ‘down the mountain’ it is.
Bueno, back to the gestiones. [...]
