spain – Page 86 – don't confuse the narrator

veranos de la villa

Reading the list of concerts planned for Madrid’s Veranos de la Villa (Summer in the City) celebrations this year is like stepping back in time.

I’m not that surprised by names like Burt Bacharach and Jerry Lee Lewis: I sort of expect those guys to go on for ever. But George Benson, Kool and the Gang, Jeff Beck, James Taylor…

In August, I’ll be attending the Writers’ Summer School in Swanwick. There’s a ‘Retro Revival’ disco planned for the Tuesday night, and I’m pretty sure the music will overlap with what’s on in Madrid this summer.

Incidentally, for the Spanish readers among you, this ‘noticia’ about the Veranos logo might be amusing. (If your Spanish isn’t quite up to scratch, remember: don’t believe everything you read on the web.)

three men went to mow

Some years ago, it was decided to ‘bury’ the M30 Madrid motorway-ringroad. The stretch just south of Puerta de Toledo coincides with the River Manzanares, and the works involved bull-dozing huge stretches of urban park and felling hundreds of trees. An awful lot of rubble was just dumped into the already sluggish river.
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weighty matters

I saw this sign in a designer shop escaparate in Madrid and wonder whether it sounds as odd in Spanish as it does to an English speaker. I guess ‘puff’ is an imported word and they just think it means some kind of small stool.

For me ‘puff’ should be associated with something as delicate and formless as smoke or clouds.

Definitely not with a solid lump of marble.

crooked houses

Potentially good news for all those Brits in Spain who are living in houses that were built without proper licences. The Reader (Almería-based English-language paper) tells us: Mayor of Zurgena and 24 more charged in urban corruption case.

An interesting language point from the story is the word prevaricación which although clearly connected to the English “prevarication” is not a direct translation.
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where the bee sucks

Carpenter bee on sunflower — not your traditional bumble bee

The flower is one of my favourites: in Spanish it’s a girasol – which neatly translates to “turnsole” in English, though we know them more commonly as sunflowers.
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