I had a lot of fun writing this post. There are so many Spanish cultural concepts that are difficult to translate into another language, and there’s a sweetness in thinking about them. When you live abroad, you develop a sort of affection for all things from your home country, and when you talk about them, you get this silly smile on your face, and all of your critical thinking evaporates, and you are able to forgive “everything”. This happened to me as I came up with these 4 untranslatable concepts in Spanish:
MERENDAR
This means to eat around 5:00 pm; between lunch (2:00 pm) and dinner (9:00 pm). The traditional ingredients of this meal, la merienda, vary across age groups. Children and teenagers eat a bocadillo (sandwich made with Spanish bread) with cold cuts, tuna fish or Nocilla, our version of Nutella. Grown-ups tend to have a café con leche and a cruasán (croissant), madalena (little muffin) or some other pastry.
QUEDARSE DE RODRÍGUEZ
“Un rodríguez” (a very common last name) is a married man that, when summer comes, stays in the city while his wife and children go to their rented vacation home at the beach. Thanks to this practice, children and wife can spend two months at the beach instead of just the one month that the father also goes on vacation. Los rodríguez travel to the beach on the weekends and, presumably, return happily to the city on Sunday night.
HACER PUENTE
The first thing Spaniards look for in their work calendars are los puentes (the bridges). These are mini vacation periods that occur when two national or regional holidays are separated by only one day, or when a holiday is separated from the weekend by one day. The bridge is thus “built” across the vacations or the vacations and the weekend making one longer vacation. Some puentes have become as traditional as the holidays they combine; for example El puente de la Inmaculada that makes December 7th a holiday by bringing together El día de la Constitución, Constitution Day, (December 6th) and El día de la Inmaculada, Immanculate Conception Day, (December 8th).
HACER BOTELLÓN
Some fifteen years ago college students in Spain developed a cheap way of consuming alcohol: They decided to buy it in supermarkets and drink it outside before going to the clubs. The youth started gathering in parking lots with their cars and their friends. This practice spread out quickly and moved to city parks and squares, which are now fixed destinations for botellón every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. As you can imagine, neighbors love it.
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