City Life

Nobody said it was going to be easy.

I walk into the supermarket by my house to get groceries for the month and some snacks to munch on. Your typical Saturday afternoon, no matter what country you are from, the weekend’s the time for shopping.

I take another look at my list and check off each item with satisfaction as my cart continues to get a little bit fuller. Contact lens solution is the only thing left. My search for the translation in Spanish has me accessing vocabulary from my mental catalogue.

“Pardon,” I ask. “¿Dónde están los lentejas?” The young clerk gestures me to follow her and directs me to the vegetable shelves and hands me a bag of lentil beans—not exactly what I had in mind.

Turns out I shoud have said lentillas (contacts), not lentejas (lentil beans). Joder (crap!), I thought.

With my Spanish friends in Barcelona, my word mispronunciations have become a common joke. These missteps have caused plenty of awkward situations and lifted eyebrows in confusion and shock with both friends and strangers. In a matter of weeks, I had managed to mismatch words and interchange them in a plethora of wrong fashions.

Cereza (cherry) for cerveza (beer) here, and cojones (male genitalia) for cojines (cushions) there. I even used frescas (fresh), when I wanted to say fresas (strawberries). Just to name a few.

Trouble seems to follow me with words and creep up when I least expect it. But I am not alone. As my studies here continued, other fellow English–speaking foreigners shared similar head–scratching incidences with me.

Whether you say you want to eat a deaf person (sordo) rather than pork (cerdo) or want to wash yourself with a piece of ham (jamón) rather than a bar of soap (jabón), these slip-ups can happen to the best of us.

In my search for some sort of remedy, a kind of guide to stop these awkward nights, I did what most do: searched Amazon. I described what I wanted in the search box nine different times, but no luck, there was nothing to aid the clueless. The best advice I can offer my foreign counterparts is to carry around a notebook and write down every mix-up, then practice, practice, practice.

I am approaching the end of my study abroad experience, and it just gets better and better each week. Perhaps when it’s all done I’ll make a remedy book of my own to help out the confused. After all, nobody said it was going to be easy. DD