donde esta la biblioteca

people often imagine i have skills or abilities of which i am sorely lacking.  i try not to correct them, as i prefer not to expose the full extent of my ignorance.  for example, knowing that i paddle on a dragonboat on weekends, one might reasonably deduce that i can swim.  this is definitely not the case.

for the past week, i've been roaming around spanish speaking countries.  i have an angeleno's understanding of spanish, which means that i can watch soccer on television and i can order a cow tongue taco at a mexican restaurant.  i do have a couple years of high school spanish though, so this provides me with a false sense of fluency.  in addition, my spanish sounding last name and fast talking ny'er nature emboldens me to engage deep conversations with locals where i am poorly equipped.

so far, with my extensive spanish vocabulary, in each of the locations i've visited, i have an expert's knowledge of:

• the location of the local library
• the color of the local library
• the location of the bathroom in the local library
• the spanish speaker's favorite book in the local library

the most interesting conversation i've had so far was with a security guard at a hotel construction site in ushuaia (another story about the hike later...).   with his limited understanding of english and our limited understanding of spanish, the conversation pretty much degraded into a form of universal sign language with wild gesturing and loud talking, which, if viewed from afar, might reasonably be mistaken for italian.

for a keepsake, he gave me a bullet on a keyring, and told me (if my spanish serves me correctly) "for my recording needs".  i'm forced to assume that argentinians have strange customs with respect to firearms and recording contracts, much like contemporary american country and gangsta rap music.

we got into a discussion of where we're from and i've since learned that if someone asks me "where i'm from", what they really mean is "where are your parents from?".  on the trip so far, the locals and fellow tourists have greeted me with ni-hao, konnichiwa, and an young ha seh yo.  an appropriate response from me would probably be: "hello, have some cawfee!".  anyway, one of the riders on the trip is from south africa.  upon hearing this, the security guard asked: "if you are from africa, why are you white?".  i could have used my spanish language fluency to discuss the subtleties of international politics and european colonialism, but there were libraries left to visit.