Snow as prozak?

I have already mentioned the snow— and if you are in the region at all, I am sure that you have been inundated with the news of it. How exactly can news shows run 24 hour a day snow watches? I mean, really, isn’t it a bit much.

That said, my commentary is not about the overwhelming coverage and sensationalism of the storm. It is about how the snow effects people.

Every day I walk Harley on the same route through the same neighborhood. Actually, it happens several times a day. Every day, neighbors see me doing it. No one ever greets me. I do my business, they do theres, and most importantly (for me) Harley does hers and we can go home. Then it snowed. I continued to walk Harley. People stop me to make sure she is okay (the snow is well over her head). People comment “what a nice day for a stroll”. They ask if the dog has boots? They ask if I live in the neighborhood and how long we have been here for. Kids ask if I like the snow. I ask if they have made snow angels yet. They show me their fort as their mothers’ look on.

Why is snow like prozak? Why does it take a HUGE storm to make neighbors neighborly?

In case you hadn’t heard

It has been snowing in DC. What a winter! Here we are this morning walking through the freshly falling snow.

Both S and Harley are pretty excited about all this weather we have been having— can’t really complain myself.

Not quite there: Commentary on Communication

There have been some great posts flying around the Spanish-English blogo sphere community recently. Abby talked about her breast infection. Lydia talked about her husband getting free condoms from a guy on the street. And Margaret coined the phrase “fake false cognates” and gave the examples: Supportar, Regular, Cinico, and Ordinario.

You may have noticed from some of these examples that the misunderstand turned out to be sexual in nature. Somehow in Chilean Spanish this is very common.  In fact, even if the word doesn’t mean something sexual, it probably has a second sexual connotation that is known and used colloquial.  Don’t believe me? Go find the book How to Survive the Chilean Jungle.  Or, better yet (and cheaper) check out Heather’s wonderful page on Chilean language.

Okay, now it is time for Clare’s embarrassing story hour. I have already mentioned that I was an exchange student in high school in Rancagua Chile. I did a lot of things that year that are embarrassing to look back on and I certainly made a lot of language errors that are embarrassing to look back on. This, however, is the worst.  And, technically, I wasn’t even the one to say it.  But, if a story of warning is to be told about stretching language abilities and saying the opposite of what one wants to say… this is it.

I had a good American friend in my town, there were actually 9 of us.  But, one day, or rather, one night, I was at this friends house. We got all dressed up and ready to go to the discoteca.  Like all adolescense we were sure that we were big and adult and could take care of ourselves. Like a good US teenage girl, we saw ourselves and good feminists and we need no boys to “take care of” us.

A host mother was concerned that we were going out together and without boys from our class to protect us. We argued back in passable Spanish that we would be fine. That everyone did it. That we were big and strong and smart and self reliant.  The mom continued that we could be raped.  We wanted to say we would fight back, but we didn’t have the words. We wanted to say that we would punch them. But we didn’t have the words.  My friend, however, did have a ring in the shape of a frog.

Short Spanish lesson:  Frog= Rana.  Toad= Sapo.

So, she told the mom that she would hit the rapist with her sapo.  I backed her up. It seamed a reasonable way to get around our lack of language— and hopefully out the door.  Suddenly, there was a stunned host mother gasping “QUE???”.  So the story was repeated.  Laughter ensued.  And, a bit later we got out the door.

It took us two days to find out what had been said. Everyone who heard the story feel over laughing, but refused to translate.  Turns out, in vulgar slang, it refers to female genitalia.  Yea.  Think of that word in English and then insert it into the sentence, “don’t worry, I will hit the rapist with my ________”

New wheels

It is official.  We bought a car. This is the first car I have bought— and it is new to boot!  So, here are my comments:

• Definitely test drive.  There were cars that I ended up loving after driving (the Nissan Rouge AWD that we bought) and there were things that I found out that I didn’t realize earlier (RAV4’s back door opens like a real door thus making it hard to open if someone is parked behind you, and the Mitsubishi outlander dashboard was hard to read)
• We did end up negotiating via email.  This worked better for me.  I could get a quote and then go somewhere else and get them to match or beat it.  I wouldn’t have been able to do this running back and forth.
• The phrase “out the door price” really helped as different dealers had different ways of calculating cost, extras, and fees.  Thank you Dan for telling me that one!
• Although, we didn’t really care about the color, I love the bright blue of my brand new Nissan.
• We were really lucky we didn’t choose the Rav4 (our initial first choice) as it was recalled the day after we bought the car!
• I am learning that I simply don’t want to know if others got a better price or if I could have haggled down a little more (I probably could have).  But, I just want to be happy with my new car and with the fact that my commute has gone from 120 minutes to 40 per day!

A little smile today

Yes, yes, I know– videos two posts in a row. But when Calliope posted this I really really laughed. I wanted to share that laugher (although I admit it might be a generational thing)

Little dancing cartoon russians! Ooopa!

Ah, the things I find in Russian class. I can’t tell you how many times I have watched this video now and I am always excited when I understand another word or phrase. That said, the first million times or so I was watching it with out the rough translation this individual has added.

Photo Wednesday: We like our wine

Let us welcome back photo Wednesday!

Casas del bosque, originally uploaded by coming2cambodia.

One of the things I miss about Chile (you know beyond family, friends and siesta) is the good quality wine that is super affordable. It has made it really hard to buy wine in the US.

Buying stuff

So, I am currently, via email, negotiating for a better price on our first car as a couple. I would like to give props the suggestion on my last post (the salesman who only thought I could be interested in the color of a car even thought I was talking car) that I should have asked for PINK and pitched a fit when it didn’t come in my favorite shade! Ha!

Anyways, saw a piece on smallest houses and thought I should share.  (It is, in fact, another thing people buy— just not the person who writes this blog).

And, my favorite, didn’t have a video, but can be found HERE along with the story.

Oh the horrors of car shopping

No, I don’t have a car yet.

I am, however, on the look. I thought I would do a what I did, how I felt about it, and what I got piece once I have the car. Still, today I thought I would talk about the first day.

I have been reading up cars for quite a while now. I know what we want. I know what we need. I know how much we can afford. And, I wanted to test drive.

Just because I want to ask my chilean- or married to chilean– readership, I am going to put in this aside. My chilean husband thought this was enough. We had a topic pick, we should just buy it. He was not all that into the idea of test driving and seeing if we liked how the car felt. He basically said you just drive what is in front of you and get over the stuff you don’t like. Anyone else had that experience?

Anyways, we test drove cars of the following types: Nissan, Mitsubishi, Mazda, Hyundai, and Toyota. Overall, we had great sales people…

But there is always one…

We had one older white man who clearly looked at us (young white woman and young Hispanic male) and decided off the bat he wasn’t going to make a sale. He barely even went through the motions. Mostly, he wanted to know what color car I wanted. I told him that color really didn’t matter and I was more interested in the AWD or 4WD, the type of engine, and the safety features. Once we had test drove one car, he asked if I wanted to test drive the exact same car in white to see if I liked the other color better. Exact same car, no extras, no changes, just color. Ugh!

Needless to say he was frustrating. Also, I didn’t really like the dashboard of that car.

A hora down memory lane

Stumbled upon this little Moldovan video the other day. It truly is amazing what all is on the internet!!

Watching it really was a lot of fun. Some of it was ridiculous. I don’t really remember squirrel type things in Moldova. But, I recognized places and I certainly spent many a night with grandmas, students, random people in the street/house/bar/store/school dancing the hora. Enjoy.