Wine, Roses & Pebre: Gift-Giving Etiquette at Dinner Parties in Spain vs Chile
An olive-oil fiasco that taught me two etiquettes in one week My first week bouncing between Madrid and Santiago felt like speed-dating two cousins who share a surname yet disagree on everything else. On Monday night I showed up to a Madrid sobremesa with what I thought was a fool-proof regalo: an artisanal bottle of […]
Packing Ears, Not Just Luggage: Building a Spanish Dialect Survival Kit Before Inter-Country Travel
My layover epiphany between “bacano” and “chévere” Two winters ago I flew Santo Domingo → Bogotá → Lima on a 4-day dash that promised ceviche, client meetings, and altitude headaches in equal measure. During the Bogotá layover I chatted with a gate agent and dropped my Dominican standby, “¡Qué bacano!” She grinned, corrected me with […]
How Soccer Commentary Varies by Region—and What It Teaches About Real-World Spanish
The 92nd-minute goal that tuned my ear to accents, not tactics I was crammed into one of Santo Domingo’s noisy colmados, the kind with plastic chairs, fried empanadas, and a TV hanging by miracle alone. Barcelona faced Atlético. As the clock ticked past ninety, Lionel Messi curled a free kick into the top corner. The […]
Decoding Telenovela Accents: Spotting a Country of Origin Before the Opening Credits Roll
The night my living-room became a linguistic quiz show I was holed up in my Santo Domingo apartment, battling post-beach sunburn, when my Colombian neighbor Diego popped over with a bag of empanadas and insisted we binge the newest telenovela. Five minutes in he paused the episode, grinning like he’d found buried treasure. “¿De dónde […]
Polite vs Playful: Navigating Register Shifts Across South America
A Buenos Aires coffee that cost me a blush I’d flown into Ezeiza on a red-eye from Santo Domingo, still thinking in Caribbean Spanish. At a Recoleta café I asked the server, “¿Me trae un cortado, por favor, señorita?”—the formal usted tone that keeps waiters happy in Bogotá. She smiled, leaned closer, and teased: “Che, […]
New Shores, New Sounds: Pronunciation Pitfalls for Expats Moving from Spain to Mexico
Iberian lisp meets mariachi drawl—my first taxi ride in CDMX After ten years flipping between Santo Domingo and Medellín, I landed a consulting gig in Madrid. Just when my Castilian ceceo felt natural—“Gracias, adiós, Zaragoza” with a crisp /θ/—life tossed another curveball: a project in Mexico City. My first morning there I hopped into a […]
Border-Tongue Ballet: How Code-Switching Shapes Spanish-English Hybrids in Border Cities
A breakfast order that pinballed between languages Last spring I crossed from San Diego into Tijuana before sunrise, craving a proper birria taco. I stepped up to a street cart and blurted my best polite Spanish: “¿Me regala dos, por favor?” The vendor smiled, then shouted toward the grill, “Dos tacos pa’ mi buddy aquí—¡con […]
Spray-can Spanish: Learning Dialects Through Street Graffiti
A wrong turn and a paint-splattered lesson I was hustling through Medellín’s Comuna 13, chasing the last cable-car ride, when a neon tag froze me mid-step: “No te dejés dar lora.” My Dominican ears knew lora as a parrot, but “don’t let them give you parrot” made zero sense. A local teen, skateboard tucked under […]
Catalan influence on Barcelona street Spanish
“Perdonar, que vaig fatal de temps”—real-life déjà vu at a Barcelona metro gate Fresh off a three-hour hop from Santo Domingo, I swiped my T-casual pass and froze. A teenager hustled past me, mumbling the sentence above. Half of it sat comfortably inside my Caribbean Spanish Vocabulary; the other half—vaig, temps—felt like a glitch in […]
From Ajiaco to Guagua: Indigenous Loanwords That Still Spice Up Modern Spanish
A Bus, a Baby, and a Language Time Machine One humid morning in Santo Domingo I jumped on a guagua—our battered local bus—only to spot a Peruvian backpacker giggling at the name printed on the windshield.“In Lima, guagua is a baby,” he said, showing me a WhatsApp sticker of a bread roll shaped like an […]