Posted by Chris Showers on June 7th, 2009.
I’d like to take a moment to introduce you to a new feature of this site: Spanish Sunday. You see, when I started this blog I had two big goals — the first was to make my readers aware of Spanish Culture and the second was to teach my readers a little bit about the Spanish Language. Lately, I feel as though my blog has been heavy on the “culture” end of things and a little light on the “language” side, so that’s why I’m hoping to write one post a week –on Sundays– that has to do with teaching you some aspect of the Spanish language (hence the name “Spanish Sunday”). Here is the first edition of “Spanish Sunday” which has to do with the names of the fingers in Spanish.
Basically, the names of the fingers in the Spanish of Spain are as follows. Starting with the thumb, we have the pulgar, índice, corazón, anular, and meñique. All of these words are nouns and they are all masculine.
To make things a little more clear, here’s a diagram I put together. Continue reading this post…
Posted by Chris Showers on June 6th, 2009.
 A diver emerges from the water after exploration of the Pozo Azul in Covanera. On my recent excursion to the Cañón del Ebro, one of the stops that I made was in the village of Covanera, located just outside of the city of Burgos, at a place called the Pozo Azul. Basically, the Pozo Azul is a bluish colored karst spring that has a submerged cave underneath it. Indeed, the cave below the surface of the water is said to be the longest submerged cave in all of Spain.
The Pozo Azul is quite famous in Spain amongst cave divers and, to my surprise, a diver ”appeared” from the blue depths after I had been at the location for about five minutes or so and I was able to snap a picture as he made his way out of the water. Once he got out, he told me and my travel companions that several of his fellow divers were still beneath the surface wrapping up their exploration mission and that diving in this location is not uncommon. He also explained a little bit about this history of the area and said that the bluish color is due to the way the sun reflects off the surface of the water and the rocks.
I thought it was really cool to actually be able to see and talk with one of the cave divers who frequent the area and learn a little more about the history of this karst spring. It’s also pretty interesting to think that they began exploring the cave in 1964 and still to this day there are unexplored areas. I would definitely recommend a trip to Covanera if you’re ever in the Burgos area. Continue reading this post…
Posted by Chris Showers on June 4th, 2009.
I just made a quick trip to the supermarket to buy a few items: bread, milk, potato chips, lunch meat, and chocolate bars. When I got to the checkout counter and paid the cashier, she returned my change and handed me what I like to call my “grocery bag ration” for the day, which for today’s purchase consisted of just one bag.
Now, I’m not trying to complain, but getting everything into one measly little plastic bag is a little tricky when you have a mixture of fragile and non-fragile items to carry home. For instance, in today’s purchase I had items that could be squashed (bread and chips) and items that could do the squashing (large, heavy boxes of milk). Why couldn’t the cashier have given me just one more bag? After all, she surely saw that with just one bag I was struggling to get all my items “jammed” inside without smashing anything.
This is a trend that I see in virtually every supermarket that I visit in Spain. In fact, no matter what store I go to, it’s always the cashier who keeps the bags stashed away behind the counter –almost like a hidden treasure– only to be handed out sparingly. In the USA, when you bag your own groceries at a store you usually have full access to all the plastic bags you want… here in Spain, however, the bags are rationed and you have to “sweet talk” the cashier to get more than your daily ”allotment.”
I understand that giving people less bags can cut down on costs for the store and that less plastic can save resources and help the environment. Yet still, I sometimes think that they go a little “too far” here with the whole “bag rationing” thing. Of course, that’s just my opinion. Continue reading this post…
Posted by Chris Showers on June 2nd, 2009.
 Here I am at a lookout point over the canyon. You can see the Ebro River behind me... I'm squinting from the sun, but that's ok. I wanted to share with everyone some pictures and stories from a recent trip that I took to the Ebro River Canyon located near Burgos. I took the trip with some other teachers from the school where I work and, honestly, before going I wasn’t really expecting a lot. You see, before we went, the other teachers told me that this would very much be a “rural” trip — we would be visiting small “pueblos” in the countryside and walking along rural routes. Since I consider myself a “city boy,” I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this trip very much… but I went anyway.
After going on the trip, I have to say that I was quite impressed. The villages that we visited were all very pretty, the landscape was very green (I didn’t even know things got that green here in Castilla y León), and I had the opportunity to see something that is a little less “touristy” and a little more “Spanishy,” if you know what I mean. Plus, it was nice to leave the city behind for an afternoon and get a breath of fresh, country air.
Really, I think the pictures from this trip speak for themselves. Below, I’ll leave a few more pictures for you to take a look at. If you still want to see more, you can check out my “Pueblos of Burgos” album on Picasa. Continue reading this post…
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