Well, my three-hour tour turned out less eventful than Gilligan’s.
Some pix for ya.
Eat your heart out, girls
That’s David (Da-VEED), my tour guide. I had him all to myself, since I was the only passenger on the boat. Sort of a waste for the tour company, but good for me.
He was a really good kid, and ambitious enough to end up owning the tour company (if not a whole string of them) someday. He was the middle child of a farm family who learned English by taking lessons from a neighbor (over the objections of his father and older siblings) and is now in his third year of college, also over their objections, paying as he goes for his degree.
Eat your heart out, all my snowbound, windblown friends
This is where the tour stopped for lunch
Not a very good picture, but you get the idea. I ordered fish fingers, which turned out to involve actual fish (crunchy skin-on), not the processed things I’d usually associate with that name. They came with fried plantains, pico de gallo, and another sauce I couldn’t identify. Tasty! And you sure couldn’t beat the view.
Unfortunately some people still have to work
These guys were fishing. The one in the foreground was in charge of a net (which he had completely over his head, though it doesn’t show in the photo). The man in the rearground would furiously beat the water with a stick, then help the other man corral the discombobulated pescados into the net.
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David took the opportunity to give me a Spanish lesson.
I can now say:
Tengo dos perros en mi casa. Uno es macho. Otra es hembra. El macho se llama Robbie y tiene trece años. La hembra se llama Ava y tiene ocho años.
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Thanks to helpful Jorge in comments, I can now also ask for restaurant food to go (para llevar) without implying that major organs might be torn out of anyone’s body in the process.
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David and I also had an interesting conversation about translating idiomatic expressions. I used “break a leg” as an example. He got the idea about using a special “bad luck” phrase as a good luck wish, but was bemused that it was mostly only for actors. I told him that the equivalent, in Italian, was in bocca al lupo (“in the mouth of the wolf”) — totally different expression but the exact same idea. He couldn’t think of any Spanish equivalent, though I imagine there must be one, superstition about luck being pretty universally human.
I tried getting a Spanish equivalent for “on the fly.” That concept he couldn’t get at all. He first suggested immediato, then suggested something to do with making mistakes from hasty judgment. I said, “Close but no banana.” Which didn’t help matters at all.
So much gets lost in translation.
