There is a Spanish International Student in my Shakespeare class. And I have come to love and dread talking to her.
I love hearing somebody speak Spanish. It's weird, I didn't even realise I missed hearing it. I dread sometimes having to have a conversation since I am not 100% fluent and to be honest, I sometimes completely don't understand things she says. She speaks rapidly and I get the gist of most of it.
Another thing that talking to Paula makes me note is how beautiful the language is.
Without even realising it, I had come to think of Spanish as an unattractive sounding language. Maybe it's the slight hostility (racism? What's racism for ethnicities?) in the US towards Latino people, the way white people use Spanish, purposefully mispronouncing words, like O'Rielly on Jon Stewart's show a few months ago saying "Simpatico?" (the implication of stupidity, and sort of like when people use "That's gay" to mean "that's stupid/dumb/bad", I see white men using Spanish to imply negativity or stupidity).
That rambling had a point: somewhere along the way, I'd come to think Spanish was an ugly language. I wasn't even cognitive of this until I had been deprived of Spanish by removing to England, the country with the lowest number (read: non existent) of Latinos.
Hearing Paula speak, it was like a relief. I listened, hearing her form sentences in a language that took on a new charm for me. It's a flowing, somewhat poetic language. And as we laughed, abusing our rubbish TA, Spanish seemed the only language that could quite capture our delight.
Spanish is beautiful.
And I received a great surprise yesterday when I heard her say "Coňo".
As all my Cubans (and Puerto Ricans) will know, Coňo serves as an all purpose swear word.
Mexicans, Gautamalans, Nicaraguans, basically, all other Latino groups I have met except Puerto Ricans always start at hearing it.
"What does that mean?" they chortle "Con-yo! You sound Chinese!"
Imagine my delight to see another Hispanic person to use a word that I thought unique to Cubans and Puerto Ricans. Good times.
Last weekend, I went on a day trip to the Lake District.
I'd read in various Brit Lit books of it's beauty and was very excited about it.
After a 2 hour bus ride, we arrived:
it was cold, there was snow on the ground and fog so dense, you couldn't see the other side of the lake.
We (the Grayson Heights troop) went through town, found a nice Turkish Tea Shop and the woman who worked there gave us maps for the hiking paths in the hills surrounding the lakes.
Yeah. I went hiking. Thank god I'd finally bought some wellies the night before!
Despite the fact that I was slow moving and out of breath as we trekked up the never ending hills, it provided some really beautiful views and we got to take a ferry across one of the lakes for 50p.
We went walking around the town of Windermere and stopped at a restaurant for lunch, where Sarah (an Australian undergrad that lives in Grayson) was asked if she'd like her toast regular or fried. When she inquired as to what 'fried' meant, the waitress sighed as if this were the dumbest question she'd ever heard and retorted "It's bread fried on the stove in fat!"
Sarah went with regular.
Windermere also had an awesome cake shop with cakes in the shapes of a castle and one that reminded me of the Diaroma Diaroma from the ever funny show, Community.
No comments:
Post a Comment