Sometimes When We Don’t Know a Word… We Try and Act it Out

And let me tell you, it is quite the show.

Three Prong Adaptor

We went into town to buy a three-prong adaptor thingy for Abigail’s laptop and for our BRAND NEW fridge. We had no idea what it’s called in Spanish (or English really for that matter) so we put on quite the show as we tried to act out what it was:

 We held up three fingers on one hand, two fingers on the other and the smerged them together with a “CHHHH” sound that was supposed to be electricity. Sheesh, who wouldn’t get what we were talking about from that great description? 

 We went to several different tiendas to try and find it, but to no avail. They all directed us to a store down the road. So we went there and knocked… and waited. And knocked and waited…. Nothing. We went home empty handed. It turns out that the place where we knocked and waited for so long was actually a Polloria, a restaurant that I guess sells mostly chicken. We saw the sign and knew what it said, but for some reason we believed that we could get our adapter there… I’m really glad they didn’t answer cause they would have had a hayday watching us act out a three-prong adapter at a restaurant.

Honey

Today we went to Cajamarca with Hermano Sandro (we think that’s his name… but we might be off). He took us to the Metro (a big supermarket that looks a lot more like America than anything else we’ve seen thus far). We wanted to buy some honey for our bread, but had no idea how to say honey. So we started “BZZZZZZ”ing and flapping our wings around the grocery store in hopes that he would get the idea. He said, “Oh Si, SI!” (I think that was just to get us to stop buzzing and embarrassing him.) And then told me that he knew where the bug spray was. 

I said, “No, no, para comer!”(No, to eat!)

He gave me a disgusted/confused look and said, “Quieres comer insectos?”  (You want to eat insects?)

At that point, I had no idea what to do, our BZZZing clearly hadn’t worked. Then I said, “No, es dulce!”

It finally clicked for Hermano Sandro and he laughed at our little charade.

To Grow

Today we were sorting out bugs, rocks and grass from our lunch of lentils today. Brittany wanted to know where the lentils were grown. (Brittany always has great questions, but they sure are difficult to put into words sometimes.) So we said, Los Lentejos, donde fueron….. (The Lentils, where were they….?) We didn’t know how to say grown or planted or anything of that sort so we did the following:

 (luckily Abby was close by and snapped a picture of us struggling to communicate)

After realizing what we were asking, Feliciana said: “El Suelo” or The ground.
And she thought she was hilarious.
Mornings sorting bugs out of our food are our favorite because Feliciana and Melchora just laugh and laugh and laugh at us! It's so funny, mainly because we have no idea what we did wrong. But oh how we love it here!