Habla Espanol?

This blogpost is serving as a postscript for my looooong one about Barcelona.  I had jotted down notes for things I wanted to remember.  Of course, I then forgot to consult my little notebook when I was writing the post about our adventures in Spain.  It's just sad that I always forget important things like getting to the cleaners before it closes to make sure my husband doesn't have to go to work in a moth-eaten old flannel hunting shirt and his patched khakis circa 1998.  Or to pick up a pack of tortilla chips for the chicken TORTILLA soup I'm cooking tonight for supper when I'm in the grocery store... and it's written on my shopping list.  Why can't I forget things I don't need to remember, like the leftover chocolate cake in the fridge.  And maybe the code to the cardio room door so I don't take it as a sign from God that I should probably just skip today's workout session at the gym.


The first night we were in Barcelona, my travel buddy Dana ended up going to bed before the sun even went down.  No, she hadn't been drinking all day.  Poor thing - she hadn't fully recovered from her jet lag when we went on our trip to Paris.  Then she was so excited about going to Spain several nights later that she was unable to fall asleep and thus called her husband at 3 am, England time, just to chat.  So... since she conked out early from utter exhaustion our first night in Barcelona, the girls and I did a bit of walking and sightseeing around Placa Catalunya on our own.  We returned to the apartment around 9:30 when it started to get dark and we still weren't tired.  They turned on the TV and, of course, everything was in either dubbed or subtitled Spanish.  


They flipped through the channels until they ran across a program with an intriguing title - Sexo en Nueva York.  Lest you think I was letting them watch porn, it was on basic cable rather than pay-per-view.  In the midst of unpacking or some such, the girls called me over to take a look and see if I recognized the show.  Sex and the City!

That looks just like the four of us strolling around Barcelona toting our Hermes purses while doing some sightseeing in sky high stilettos.  Well... at least two of us in our party wished we had those enviable figures as well as the income to afford being tricked out in designer everything from head to toe.  


The first thing that popped into my head when I saw what they were watching - please don't let this be one of the episodes with Samantha having crazy monkey sex with a bunch of different men.  In the states they edited nude scenes or inappropriate language out of SATC to make it acceptable for audiences watching on syndicated channels like TBS or WGN.  But over here in Europe where the drinking age is 16 instead of 21 and relaxed attitudes are the norm, you just never know what you might see on TV in the evenings with your kids in attendance... like that big, hairy naked butt in some sort of ask the doctors show advertisement that aired one afternoon.  And that was just the commercial for the program.  


So on the outside I was acting as if SATC was no big deal while on the inside I was praying fervently that I wouldn't have to do a whole lot of uncomfortable explaining.  Prude mom would have jumped in front of the TV or at least changed the channel, but I'm way cooler than that... which really means I don't think quickly on my feet and assumed this would be safe for teen eyes before it dawned on me the R for mature audiences stuff might not have been removed.  Whew!  After just a couple minutes, it became apparent to me (a fan of the show that has probably watched all 94 episodes at least twice) that this one was pretty tame.  I was aided by the fact that the whole thing was dubbed in Spanish.  I honestly never learned Spanish profanity, and neither have the girls, so we were pretty clueless as to whether they were dropping the F-bomb on a regular basis.  I thought it was kinda funny to hear Carrie and Big carrying on some sort of heated conversation in another language. 


Good news - the three of us understood only bits and pieces of the entire show.  Bad news - I had to "translate" what was happening since I was familiar with the characters, history, basic plot, etc.  Sadly, the remote control got hidden misplaced for a while the following evening so that the girls were reduced to watching Senors Homer and Bart Simpson in Espanol.  I don't know that it was less offensive, but at least I was off the hook to explain the show to them.