Language Barrier: Food in Spain
Several years ago, my parents took my sister and I on a cruise around the Mediterranean Sea. One of the stops was Barcelona, Spain. We toured Park Güell where we saw gardens and architecture created by the famous Antoni Gaudí. His work is called by some as gaudy. True, his work is quite flashy, but it is quite interesting, and it is neat to see buildings that do not fit with the rest of their surroundings. We also toured the Sagrada Família, a huge Roman Catholic cathedral that is an unfinished work of Gaudí. Unfortunately, he was run over by a streetcar and was buried in the Sagrada Família’s crypt. Workers are completing the project as best as possible; hopefully, the church will be finished in 2026, which is 100 years after the death of Guadí. We saw the church in 2013, and it was absolutely gorgeous inside. The outside still needs some work as there were construction cranes all around. However, the inside was beautiful with sun streaming in the stained glass windows.
For lunch, the tour guide let us eat on our own, so we went inside a fast food restaurant that is not native to the United States. The entire menu was in Spanish, and I was the only one out of my family who had learned any sort of Spanish. I took Spanish from eighth grade to tenth or eleventh grade. I also took 1 year of the language in college. However, I cannot speak it fluently. I knew some of the basic food words like hamburguesa, and thankfully, my parents and I were hungry for a hamburger! My sister, however, is a pescatarian and does not eat meat. She can eat fish though, so when we got up to the cashier, and it got to my sister to order, I just blurted out, “Pescado! Pescado!” The cashier pointed to a sandwich on the board and said something in Spanish. I just said, “Pescado, sí!” It turns out that I ordered my sister a tuna sandwich. Thankfully, she likes tuna! I have teased her ever since that encounter that if I had not known the Spanish word for fish, she would have starved to death! Ha!
