It's a small world after all....

Words are different here in Mexico, and maybe it’s my synapse-deficient brain, but sometimes I get confused when switching back and forth, especially if I’m translating something right away. The other day, I spent way too much time trying to think of the English word for “lima” (nail file).

I’m not bi-lingual, since I actually took Latin as a foreign language in school (only benefit: I’m pretty good at crossword puzzles). I can follow and understand a movie in Spanish, and, unfortunately I do understand my Mother In Law, way, way too well. I have a pretty good vocabulary and aside from my strange New England pronunciation most people, with a little patience, can understand me quite well.

Since I subscribe to the “living it and learning it school of Spanish” I oftentimes encounter words that are really weird and confuse me. For example, the other day in my yoga class, we were supposed to do small circles with our “munecas”. Now, I knew that “muneca” meant doll, and in all the years I’ve been doing yoga I’ve never brought a doll to class, so I watched surreptitiously as everyone else spun their wrists around.

So I get home, and I ask the Fabster, “You have the same word for doll and wrist? That’s weird.”
“Yeah, almost as weird as having the same word for the lower back of your leg and a baby cow,” he replied.

There’s also words in Spanish, that simply don’t exist in English. For example, Tocayo (or Tocaya if you’re a female) which means “person with the same name as me.” Think about it, the best we English speakers can do in this situation is high five each other and say “Same name guy!!.”

Another great example is “Provecho” which means “Enjoy your food.’ The best we can do with that sentiment is ‘Bon Appétit, which is, in fact, French, and defeats the entire purpose.

Last week, in the Cozumel 4 You Newsletter, I featured this really cute one-eyed terrier up for adoption. (He’s cute, and still up for grabs, if you’re interested) and when the wonderful Rodrigo Rodriguez translated as “tuerto” so, essentially again, there exists in Spanish one word for a whole concept we don’t have.

Further investigation, again, via the Fab-man, reveals that there also exists “cojo” (one-leg guy) and “manco’ (the proverbial one armed man)

These little differences fascinate me. For example, here they play “Crazy 7s” and not “Crazy 8s” Turkeys do not say “gobble, gobble” but rather “gordo,gordo” (fat, fat!)
However, my all time favorite is the noise that roosters make. In English, there’s the “cock-a-doodle-do” of Farmer Brown fame. Here barnyard fowl say “Ki-ki-Ri-Ki”

Try it sometime, it makes for good cocktail party conversations!!

What is it with me and birds??

Seriously, is this the Chinese year of the bird? Am I working out some bad karma from a past lifetime? Is Alfred Hitchcock attempting to communicate with me from the grave?

First there was the drive-by vulture wrestling of last month, where me and the minion of death collided on a bicycle (well, I was on the bicycle, the vulture was flying obviously..).

This traumatic event has become such instant Cozumel legends that Rodrigo Rodriquez, who does the Living Legends on the Cozumel 4 You webletter wrote a poem about it!! (no, I didn’t publish it, it’s embarrassing!)

The other day, I was at Blu Bambu getting my haircolor totally changed (bye bye blondie!) and I’m standing over by the window, and I look up and screamed like a 12 year old girl. Literally about 2 feet away from me, and at eye level was this enormous albino peacock.

“oh, peacock, pretty..” you think. Not so. This was the nasty version of peacock. First of all it was hyperventilating (I didn’t even know that birds DO that) and it’s creepy forked beak-colored tongue was hanging out, and it was pecking at the window, like it wanted to come in and peck out my eye.

Katie (witness) who was with me tentatively tapped the window in a gentle attempt to encourage this freak of nature to perhaps pant elsewhere. No such luck, what the gentle tapping did, in fact do, was convince the disgusting thing to turn around.

Now, you’ve seen how distorted people’s faces are when they squish them into a pane of glass and make funny faces, right? Well, let’s just say that Katie and I got a birds-eye view of everything you ever wanted to know about peacock hiney. The worst part about it, because of the damn tail, the bird kinda got stuck, and the twist/mooning took place in slow motion.

“Eeewwww,” Katie actually said out loud. Unbelievably enough she actually had her camera with her and managed to snap a photo! The photo became incredibly important since as soon as the monstrosity tottered off I called the Fab husband, and told him the whole story, and he did not believe me.

It seems that there are some people out there who think that I have a tendency to exaggerate in order to make a story better, and the Fabster thought it was perhaps a large chicken or maybe a dove. And to all you naysayers out there, you know what I say? POPPYCOCK!