One word makes all the difference

Yesterday I was determined to eat a meal other than Special K. My roommates and I headed out to run errands and find a market. First we went to Vodafone to get SIM cards. I should say that my Spanish is pretty good, but my vocabulary is very small and I don't have the best memory. So I have been getting around well enough. So in Vodafone I explained that we wanted SIM cards and the woman showed us a couple different options and we chose one. When she was ringing us up she said in Spanish, "You can choose a different plan so that you can call people more "barato". I think I looked at her with a blank stare because she grabbed another sales girl to tell me in English. "You can choose a different plan so that you can call people more cheaply." OOOOooooh. Cheap. That's probably a good word to know.

My next task was to find a coin purse. I had way too many euros jangling around in my purse. At this point I would like to thank all my Spanish professors over the years who forced us to describe the word we wanted to use when we didn't know the actual word. It's awkward but it gets the job done. Obviously I didn't know the word for coin purse so at the little trinket shop we went in I asked for a bag that holds coins. She said, "Claro, un monedero." I made the poor sales girl repeat the word about four times so I could say it and remember it. Not really sure if I'll ever need that word again but you never know.

Next we found a market to fill our painfully bare fridge. Grocery shopping here was a really funny experience. The most noticable difference is that apparently the only thing Spaniards really like is red wine and ham. I'm ok with the wine part, but the ham is another story. Chopped ham, sliced ham, roast ham, leg of ham, you can even buy the whole pig. Even when I made it over to frozen vegetables it was peas (with ham), spinach (with ham), mixed veggies (with ham). Not exactly my favorite of the meat family. Luckily I found a package of sliced turkey (the one and only package in the store) and a bag of peas sin jamón. The market also offered just about anything you can imagine in canned form but very little in the way of fruits and veggies. So this could take a little getting used to. When I finally made it to the checkout line there were two older women in front of me with a whole lot of stuff. The checker scanned a huge box of what else, Special K, and it rang up as 3.90. The Spanish women immediately began ranting in Spanish about how the Special K was 3 euros and not 3.90. The checker had to leave the stand and go look for the price only to come back and assure them it was 3.90. They protested further so the checker had to go find her manager in the store (I guess they don't have PA systems here) and finally returned with the guy who was able to convince the señoras that the cereal was indeed 3.90. With that the women shrugged and said, ok, we'll still take it.

After we got home I realized that we didn't have a corkscrew and I figured over the course of 9 months or so we would definitely need one. So I went out on my own to Corte Ingles, which is sort of like Target except 6 floors and way more expensive. I did my homework ahead of time and knew that the word was "sacacorchos". A nice sales lady brought me over to the sacacorchos department and went above and beyond by showing me all the different types of sacacorchos and taking them out of their box and demonstrating how they work and why this one was far better than this other one. As she's showing me them I sneak a peak at the price tags and wonder if these sacacorchos are made of gold. She is explaining how simply fabulous one particular sacacorchos is when I ask, "Yes. But do you have one more barato?"