“Què dius?” "I'm going to Italy!"

“Què dius?” That’s what they say here at the beginning of a conversation, like if you see someone you know in the street. It means “What are you saying?” Better translated as something like “What are you telling me?”. So basically you are immediately under pressure to come up with something interesting about what you have done today, where you are going now, or what you will be doing later. I really do feel under pressure when somebody says it, just imagine it in English “Hi!” “Hey! What are you telling me??” So direct haha.

Another way of starting a conversation is “Qué tal?” kinda like “How are you?”, and if you’re out walking, for example, you can say “here, walking.” or if you’re in the supermarket, you can answer with something like “here, buying things.” They know how to get right to the heart of things here, it’s a lot less superficial than casual English conversation.

In syntax class today, the teacher, bless him, seemed so scared of using an english sentence to demonstrate a point, he was like “You help me okay? I’m gonna write the phrase, and you tell me if anything’s wrong with it okay?” (pardon my lazy translation, I know we don‘t say “okay?” all the time in English). On the other hand, he didn’t seem at all afraid of using a basque phrase as an example haha. We had a “5 minute pause” a couple of hours into the class (which apparently was “nearly not worth it” but it so was), which obviously meant 15 minutes, ahhh the Spanish sense of time ©.

I managed to not lose all the money I earned yesterday, yay! Also, I got some envelopes, from Carrefour of course. Carrefour’s so great, I swear they are rolling out “Carrefour discount” (the equivalent of ASDA Smartprice) products to fit my needs. It’s like, when I arrived they had hardly anything in the discount range, but then I found chocolate rice cereal, and then the next week dark chocolate, and this week they started stocking discount tomate frito (fried tomato)! I haven’t tried the tomate frito yet but I think I will tomorrow, I’m sure it will be better than the bonpreu stuff

I’m going to Italy next month! For my Catalan Dialectology class we’re going to Alghero, in Sardinia, which is the city in Italy where some people speak Catalan. And it just so happens that I have a friend who happens to be working on that very same island in a city not too far away! So hopefully I shall be able to see her! It just gets better and better, AND I’m allowed to take hold luggage so I can take all the liquid (hairspray) I want! ^_____^

It’s less than two months til I’m going to visit England! Wheeeeee!!!