a girl in the world

finding beauty, pleasure and grace on the road less traveled

Spanish: lesson 2

A few more of my favourite words:


pesadilla (peh-sah-dee-shaa)

Nightmare.  Really?!  What a beautiful word for nightmare.


llover (show-vehr)

This is the verb for rain.  Rain is a verb!

yo lluevo. I rain.
vos lloves. You rain.
el llueve. It rains.
nosotros llovemos. We rain.
ellos lloven. They rain.

cuchillo (cooch-eee-shoh)

Knife.  This is very similar to the tagalog (Filipino) version which is cuchillio (cooch-eee-lee-yoh) but the Castellano version is much more fun to say.

And some of my favourite sentences (taken from my grade 1 level workbook):

Los loros repite todo lo que oyen.

Translation:  The parrots repeat all they hear.

Oyen here is pronounced oh-shen.  Ohshen ohshen ohshen!  Fun fun fun!

A la mañana yo siempre caliento el agua para hacer maté y despues me ducho rapidamente.

Translation:  In the morning I always heat water for maté and then I shower quickly.

Do you know how amazing it feels to read that sentence and know what it means?!  I comprehend!  I comprehend!  Yo entiendo!

And other fun things!

Breakfast, lunch and dinner are also verbs!  I breakfast, you breakfast, he breakfasts, we breakfast!

Que bueno!

While I was sleeping

I’m a night owl.  He’s an early bird.  I can sleep in till noon if left to my own devices.  He’s up prowling the apartment like a cat at 7.30 AM.  Sometimes he takes pictures of sunrises.  Like this morning.  I think I’ve only ever seen one, maybe two, sunrises in my life.  Once in Greece while dancing till dawn and second on an airplane crossing the international date line.  =)

Everything in its place

A few nights ago, I decided to honour my place as a woman and my mother’s origins from the food capital of the Philippines (Pampanga) by cooking dinner.  Specifically, I decided to cook a staple Philippine chicken dish called adobo.  Yes, I said it. I volunteered to cook something different from scrambled eggs and toast.  I’ve attempted this dish several times before (it’s my default exotic dish whenever I want to show off my culinary culturedness) so it wasn’t a new feat for me.  This time, however, it turned out better than normal.  Delicious, in fact!  Just the right balance of salt and sweet, with caramelized onions and garlic.  I marinated, I boiled, I pre-fried and sautéed.  I consulted mama’s recipe over and over again to make certain I did everything right.  And it turned out excellent!  Yummy!  Sumptuous!

Mama, you would have been so proud of me (bar the fact that I burnt the coffee, AGAIN!)!

But, besides the delight of cooking something and having it taste the way it’s supposed to, something more serendipitous added to my joy that night.  I was so overcome with glee when I found out that the kitchen utensils we’ve been using are perfectly matched to our pots and pans!  Please see the picture below for a clearer idea of what I mean.  The hole in the giant spoon!  It fits just there, on the handle of that pot!  There’s a whole set of them – utensils, pots and matching holes and notches.  How great is that?  So great!  So great, in fact, that I might just be inspired to cook again.

*gasp*

ArgentinaQ22010-16

Hi, I'm Denise. I'm a writer, artist and photographer. This is where I share what I'm seeing, learning and making.
Twitter


Subscribe



On this date