PONTEVEDRA PENSÉES: “Latta” & Stuff

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16 Feb, 2017
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PONTEVEDRA PENSÉES: “Latta” & Stuff

Pontevedra Pensées: 15.2.17
By Colin Davies

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How I hate Starbucks, Costa Coffee and the like. Here’s a conversation I had this morning, after determining that my daughter wanted a white coffee:
A white coffee, please.
What sort of white coffee would that be?
A regular white coffee
Do you mean a black coffee with milk on the side?
As opposed to what?
A latta [sic]

I don’t know what that is. I’ll ask my daughter

[Returning]
She just wants a regular white coffee.
A latta [sic]?
Yea. Just give me one of those.
[Returning to daughter with a small vase of milky looking liquid]
What’s that?

It’s a latte , I guess. Or as she called it, a ‘latta’. She’s not English. Nor Italian, I’d hazard a guess.

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Talking of purchasing expensive drinks . . . If you didn’t know you could buy ‘luxury water’ at 80 quid a bottle, click here. Presumably, it doesn’t come from a tap in Peckham. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

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Last evening, I went to post an urgent letter of my daughter’s. The 1.3 miles to the post box took me 35 minutes, through the usual traffic jams. And I walked the last 0.3 miles, having parked the car on the pavement/sidewalk in frustration, and fear I wouldn’t make the 6.15 deadline. This is about 2mph, or 3.2kph. In retrospect, I should have walked all of it.

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If you’ve ever wondered why English film titles are rendered into something very different in Spanish, this El País article, in English, might help you a bit. As for La La Land, I’m lucky as I’ve got a friend who’s seen it and given me the benefit of his experience. So, I won’t be bothering.

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Uh, uh. Trouble brewing in Cataluña. More trouble, I mean. It can only end in tears. Or rips in the Constitution.

Valley of the Fallen

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I think I’ve reported that as many as 200,000 EU citizens have left Spain in recent years, possibly driven out by new tax laws such as the infamous Modelo 720. A goodly proportion of these seems to have left the lovely Valencian town of Jávea which I visited last year and rather liked. I doubt this has gone down well with the locals.

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I voiced here last year my disgust for the Franco memorial in the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid and opined that the mausoleum should be dynamited out of existence. In a rather calmer tone, Spain’s socialist party, the PSOE, is demanding that at the very least the dictator’s corpse be removed from it. Click here for more on this.
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Images
Featured image (Latte)/Tara Hunt, CC BY-SA2.0
Water/Tara Taylor CC BY2.0
Valley of the Fallen/Valle de Los Caidos/Hakan Svensson, CC BY2.5
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Published by permission (Pontevedra Pensées: 15.2.17)
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