Years and years and years ago I went to Cadiz and my memories had gradually faded so that all I could remember was that everything was closed and there was nowhere to eat. More recently my daughter went and came back raving about a restaurant she had found, and I had been planning a weekend away with my friend Kate, so it seemed a good idea to revisit.
Filed under: Spanish language by Liz Parry
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I love Granada. I always have, and I’d live there if it had a sea view and if I couldn’t live in Malaga, which I also love. Both cities are actually improving, too. The walk down from the Alhambra into the city centre has always been unbeatable – the sound of the water running down alongside you, the fragrant lush greenery, the benches where you can just sit for a while and breathe it all in, enjoying the shade and the breeze. But the walking down has actually improved since there has been a little Alhambra bus to take you UP. It takes a route through the back streets that larger vehicles couldn’t tackle, and delivers you, not breathless, at the top by the ticket office. Of course on the May bank holiday weekend there were no tickets left to go in and see the Alhambra, but that didn’t matter much. The queues looked pretty hot. I have a tip, for anybody who hasn’t yet seen inside the Alhambra and would like to have it to themselves for a while. Get a ticket for one evening when you can see the floodlit version, and position yourself at the front of the queue for your time slot. When the doors open, don’t stop to admire the first bit you come to, or the second. Go straight through as far as you are allowed (the ‘Patio de los Leones’ unless things have changed). Everyone else will stay looking at everything in the right order, and you have the Lions to yourself for some time before you start working your way backwards….
Another Granada tip. If you want to see inside the Catedral, you can go to the front and pay for a ticket. If a little cathedral goes a long way with you though, go round to the square (Pasiegas) at the back and see if the door is open for mass-goers. You can see a fair proportion of it that way – probably more than enough, if you are also going to go into the Royal Chapel down the side. Apart from the Alhambra, this has to be the most tourist-populated spot, and it is right next to the Alcaicería – the old silk bazaar now full of souvenir shops. Which is fine if you want a cheap pink flamenco dress for your niece, but to my mind, the shops near the other corner of the Plaza de las Pasiegas and between there and the Plaza Bib-Rambla are much more interesting. Like the “mercerías” where you can buy buttons and trimmings to make your own flamenco dress, or the one on the corner where you can buy a sword or a kitchen knife, or just watch the man (I swear he’s been there for 30 years) sharpening knives with a whetstone. A dry one, which I understand isn’t the usual thing, but I wouldn’t know about that. There are fruit and veg stalls as well, and a wonderful place, which I know for a fact has been there for more than 30 years, which sells fabrics by the kilo. I once bought 250 grams of fake fur rug there, for a few pesetas.
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I really wasn’t going to write any more about air travel, at least not for a while, but reading Chris O’Connell’s comment on my last blog I had a re-think. The vagaries of the different airlines and pros and cons of various airports all figure in conversations around these parts – in fact at SUR in English we could probably come up with a detailed list, along with tips on things like how to get your little tin of vaseline through security without a re-sealable transparent plastic bag, or where it is best to pack heavy items (in the big pocket of the coat you wear until asked to take it off is good, but a bit obvious in mid-summer in Malaga).
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EasyJet found another way to get up my nose this weekend, and I wasn’t even travelling via East Midlands with its abominable bag machine! But just in case, I’d got my own re-sealable plastic bag. I’d steadfastly refused all offers of priority boarding, luggage and insurance, and reduced my weekend equipment to the absolute minimum (toothbrush, book, change of underwear, laptop. I just love going to spend a weekend with my daughter, who supplies everything else). I’d put these items in the less than overhead-luggage-locker sized bag conforming to all known airline regulations. I thought I was safe!
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Easter is coming up and I was just thinking the other day about one time years ago when I was asked to translate the Semana Santa programme of processions in Malaga into English. Anybody who has ever translated Spanish into English knows that English words tend to be shorter, and Spanish writers are often not concise, so you end up with a considerably shorter text and have to explain that you haven’t actually cut chunks out, it’s just the way it is. (more…)
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I’ve spent too much time recently at the dentist’s. Any time is too much time, of course, but when you spend half an hour beforehand in the waiting room, waiting for the dentist to turn up to work, it becomes even more eternal, if such a thing is possible. Both times she claimed to have been stuck in the same traffic jam that I had left home very early in order to avoid, so my teeth were tightly clenched before she ordered me to open wide. (more…)
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Nobody has called it “Operation Corruption” yet, probably because each instance has its own code name, which the police must use to keep their investigations secret until arrests are made, and then we know that they’ve been calling the town planning corruption case in Marbella the “Malaya” case, and the Alhaurín el Grande investigation is “Troya”. “Astapa” refers to corruption in Estepona, and so, one suspects, it will go on. Other cases of (alleged) town planning corruption have been uncovered already in Gaucín, Manilva, Cómpeta, Tolox, Ojén and Ronda and are going through the legal process, hence the use of the word “alleged”. Now it’s Alcaucín’s turn. (more…)
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I always knew English speakers had it easier when it comes to gender. Well you know what I mean! We don’t have to make our adjectives agree with our nouns, or learn that ‘agua’ is feminine and the only reason it’s “el agua” is because “la agua” is quite difficult to say, and as soon as you’re talking about waters with an ’s’ you’re OK and can say ‘las aguas’. Of course we do sometimes have to debate whether a female poet should be called a poetess, or whether that’s too antiquated, or too politically correct, and whether the same applies to actors and actresses. Do we have female bishops? Bishopesses? But I digress.
(more…)
Filed under: Spanish language by Liz Parry
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I’ve got into the habit now of jotting things down when they come up – and I have to say sorry to any friends who have found their flow interrupted by my sudden search for a pen and scrap of paper. It happened the other day when someone was referred to as being a fruitcake, and instead of asking about the evidence of this person’s nuttiness, I rummaged in my bag and wrote down “cake, nuts, Cadbury’s fruit and nut? Equivalent?” I haven’t had time to investigate the origins or first use of the fruitcake expression (probably Shakespeare, it usually is), but I do know that nobody I have asked can come up with a similar one in Spanish. “Chiflado” just doesn’t have the same fruitiness…
Another one that had me breaking off the conversation to find my notepad was “a chip off the old block”. No problem with the Spanish, which is “de tal palo tal astilla” but I wonder if there is any significance in the fact that in English it’s chips and blocks, and in Spanish splinters and sticks? More stonemasons in olde England, and more carpenters in la vieja España maybe?
And what about having a chip on your shoulder? Any ideas?
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For some reason, Macarena’s comment on “Idiomatic expressions” on this blog set me thinking about the time (way back when, we needn’t go into that) when I was an English language assistant (“lectora” I was called – do they still have those?) in a school in Malaga. My boss, the head of the English department, tried to drum English into the boys’ heads by making them learn passages from a book at home and regurgitate them in class. Good for their memories, no doubt, but not much fun, and I don’t think they learned much English that way. My classes were more fun – I made them sing, and do quizzes, and I learned a lot of Spanish from them… But they still can’t have learned a lot because at the end of the year a large proportion failed the exam. Course work was taken into account too, and those marks were awarded by the other English teacher, a very nice woman whose English was about on a par with my Spanish, and me. She decided we would solve the problem of mass exam failure by giving high course work marks to bring the average up, and explained her decision saying “Well, it’s only English, isn’t it?”
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