Friday 13 February 2009

No vale

I start to realise there are limits to the usefulness of the Spanish I learnt during my working time in Madrid and Barcelona.

Over the last week I’ve been finishing so many sentences with “¡ah, vale!”, a smart – at least so I thought! – way of showing agreement and understanding. I think now I can explain the slightly confused smile people threw back at me: the interjection “¡vale!” has no other meaning in Guatemala than “it’s worth something” or, alternatively, it’s a way of telling someone you couldn’t care less about what they’ve just said. Great ice breaker, isn’t it?

“Coche” is not a car – it’s a pig. I started the other day a conversation with Señor Orlando – Conchita’s husband – about cars and trucks. He was telling me about his work as a mechanic, so I guess he must have been confused with why the hell I was referring to food all the time.

No problem. They always smile back at the strange foreigner, and I’ll stick to the belief that my communication issues only go as far as a word with mixed meaning here and there.

I’ll stick to that belief. As we say in Portugal, never contradict a lunatic…

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