Of course, this does not stop them from translating stuff in ridiculous fashion. In Pontevedra station the other day, for instance, I saw a big cardboard poster thing advertising a kind off coffee drink (I hesitate to call it coffee) available in the station buffet. It showed some mountaineers arriving at the summit of some snow-covered peak or other. “At the top of the flavour!” declared the advert. Really! What does that mean? I am pretty sure you can say “En la cima del sabor” (la cima = the top, the summit) in Spanish but the expression is pretty meaningless in English. Probably translated by one of the 51% who think they can speak English.
Anyway, it turns out that only Hungarians and Bulgarians are worse at learning English than the Spanish. This is, of course, only counting the countries of Europe. The French and the Portuguese do a little better at 59% and 58% respectively. But you have to be Scandinavian to do really well: 96% of Norwegians and 94% of Danes speak English. One theory is that the less likely you are to find people who speak your language around the world, the more likely you are to learn another language in order to be able to communicate. And nowadays the language of mass communication happens to be English. The British, Spanish, French and Portuguese all had empires that spread their language to other places in the world. It’s one explanation anyway.
However, you have to admire the Spanish ability to try. Just about everyone will have a go at speaking some English to you, even if it’s just the taxi driver saying “thank you” instead of “gracias”. I also like the way they adapt foreign words to their own spelling rules. I have watched the French “croissant” go from “croisán” to “curasán”. Wonderful! And then there’s “chucrut” for “choucroute” and “froidiano” for “Freudian”. I could go on and on.
Meanwhile, as we head back to the UK tomorrow for a while, the weather forecast for once promises better weather back in Delph than it does in Vigo. This must be a first. I commented on a taxi driver saying that this year Galicia went straight from winter to summer, missing out spring altogether. Well, the same may be happening to autumn. In a matter of days we have gone from being in the swimming pool to needing a jacket to walk down the road. OK, I exaggerate a little. It’s not really cold (17° on the billboard down the road this morning) but the road is suddenly full of fallen leaves and yesterday we had thunderstorms. As I said, skipping through the seasons. Maybe this is another, new and strange aspect of the cuts!
Because of the rain yesterday, people collecting shoppers from Mercadona absolutely NEEDED to get as close to the doorway as possible. This led to some spectacular double-file parking, all illegal I suspect, down on Aragón. In this photo taken from our balcony, the two inner lines of cars are not driving along the road, as they might seem to be doing, but are parked!! Consistent to the last!
The weather didn’t improve until quite late in the evening when suddenly we got a stormy-looking sunset. Such is the variety of life in Galicia.
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