Christof's Blog: My Spanish Crash Course on the Peninsula Valdés

Day 3 of my Argentinian voyage was reserved for a tour of the wildlife reserve at the Peninsula Valdés, which I had booked from Europe already. What the tour operator had not told me was that a) "English speaking guide" means the guide speaks English, but not necessarily does so most of the time and b) everyone else on the tour was from Argentina. So I spent the day not only admiring the flora and fauna, but also the human brain's capacity to make sense of languages you do not actually speak. With supposedly useless years of Latin and a few less of French under my belt, I was able to know what the group was being told about and pick up some new Spanish words to add to my scarce vocabulary. For full disclosure: In tenth grade at school I had one year of Spanish, but as it was only an elective without actual grades and the teacher didn't like my creative mix of Spanish vocabulary and French grammar, putting "Basic Spanish" on my CV would be more than exaggerated. So let's do the tour by a few words I learned today:

Ballenas: This means "whales" - the main attraction of the Peninsula - and the reason we were heading to Puerto Pirámides, where the whale watching boats leave, as a first stop. The last time I went whale watching was in Kaikura in New Zealand and the sperm whales there were small and also less visible than the huge Southern Right Whales that come here as they find the ideal place to have a nice little sexy time and then raise the resulting calves here. Which leads me to my second word.

Macho: Yes, I know that one doesn't really count (nod to my Austrian friends and the note that Sepperl rhymes with Depperl), but today I learned that the males referred to by this word are behaving as such as they leave raising their offspring entirely to the sexy whale lady they have knocked up. The British marine biologist we had as a guide on the boat telling us about the whales in Spanish with a gringo accent (yes, even I was able to hear that), had a lot more fun facts about their mating behaviour, half of which I actually believe to have understood. Those included that the "testiculos" (word number three and I am proud to say that I now know a synonym for cojones) are 50 kg each and produce a payload of 7 liters. In case those figures should be inaccurate I blame it on this guys English accent rather than my nonexistent Spanish.

Marra Patagonica: A rabbit that is actually related more closely to the antelopes. This is evidently true as I have tried to shoot several pictures of these, all of which are blurry. We also saw Pingüinos de Magallanes (Magellanic Penguins) as well as sea elephants with one particluar male weighing in at 4000 kg distributed acrossnthe size of your average delivery van, Merino sheep, Lamas and Emus. The only animal I did not see, although there had been sightings that day, were Orcas, but as they ar called the same in Spanish, that is probably fine.

As you can see, my newly acquired Spanish words all revolve around the fauna, but I also want to point out that I can make sense of restaurant menus as well - which should save me from starving at least.

More pidgin Spanish lessons with Christof coming soon. Hasta manana!