the local spanish

My muscles ache a tad this morning from my many swims yesterday. :-) It was a good beach day, not too crowded, although we did notice many untanned recent arrivals from northern Spain. Vacation season has officially begun. I had good fun listening to the different accents; it was refreshing to hear a mother asking her young son "A donde vas?" rather than "don-e va?", which is how it would sound if spoken by a native of our village. When we first met our landlord Pepe, he walked us from the main square to the house on Calle Salares. As we passed friends of his along the way, he stopped to have brief conversations, and I could discern little of the exchanges. They truthfully sounded like no more than a series of grunts. Our neighbor Antonio shortens "adios" to just "yo", which transports me back to South Philly. When Almendena calls her daughter, "Marisu," she is really saying "Maria Jesus". Last year Big Jim and I took a weekend trip to Morocco to buy some furniture for the new house. The one morning we were sitting on the breakfast terrace at the hotel when a group of two men and women sat at the table next to us. Suddenly I realized I could understand everything they were saying. I grabbed Big Jim's leg and whispered excitedly in his ear, "I can understand them; they are speaking Spanish. Proper beautiful Spanish." I was relieved. For my first year here, I thought I had some sort of mental block that was keeping me from understanding most of the locals in the village. Now I knew it was just the dialect spoken in the village that was causing me trouble. This was reinforced about six months ago, when I joined our friend V. and her son and his friend for a drink at Bar Loro. At one point the friend, who was from Asturias, decided he wanted some dessert. I sat back and watched as he tried to explain to Miguel the waiter that he wanted a baked apple with ice cream on the side. The two Spanish men, one from the north and the other from the south, could not understand one other. I finally explained to Miguel what the man from Asturias was requesting and then translated back Miguel's response. I felt vindicated. That said, I had the same experience when I met a woman in the village from Glasgow. During our first conversations, I swear I only caught about one of every five words. Now that my ear is better trained I can usually follow what she's saying; if not, I just nod and smile when it seems appropriate. The sea was rough yesterday, but still nothing compared to the waves I'm accustomed to in the US. It was bad enough, though, for Big Jim to swim out at one point and tell me he thought I should come in. When I got closer to shore, I saw what he meant. There was a strong undertow, and the waves were really pounding the beach. I just watched the movement of the tides and surfed in easily (and without having my swimsuit ripped off, which almost happened to Big Jim). I was glad to see, though, that most parents had gathered up the small children and taken them back to their towels; it had become too dangerous for the little ones. We found lots of sea glass yesterday, including some hard to find purple pieces. I think I am going to have to transfer my collection to a larger jar. I can't believe it's August already....only four or five beach trips left for the season. :-( hasta pronto, mylifeinspain