Spanish Posters

Marcie likes to bring posters back from her trips. A good image with non-English text makes a good one for her office wall. When we went past the bullring in Seville, she was delighted to be able to buy a copy of the poster for the 2006 bullfighting season there. (I'd have bought one myself, but I don't like paying for posters, and one shouldn't really be putting money into bullfighting, right?)

Later in the afternoon, we were heading into the Christopher Columbus archives, and I spotted a choral concert poster, nice photo, Spanish text, only loosely taped to a stone wall. I carefully removed the poster from the wall. "Here's one for you, Marcie."

"Oh, no," she said. "For me a poster has to be truly beautiful before I'll put it up on the wall. But you can keep it." I held onto the thing all the way through the archives and then threw it out. If it's not beautiful enough for Marcie, it's not beautiful enough for me. Right?

Several hours later, we were back in Malaga. Outside the construction around the train station, hundreds of giant posters had just been put up. "Hey, Marcie, how about these shoes! I bet I could peel one of these off for you!"

"Are you kidding?" Marcie wrinkled her face in disgust. "I wouldn't put that on my wall"

"I would", I said. "I like those shoes and 'song of the crazy' is great. I'm going to come back tomorrow and take a picture of these posters. Then I'm going to mount it and give it to you for your birthday. And you'll have to say, 'oh, thank you, how nice'." Then we rounded the corner and there was a guy with an armful of posters.

"Those must be the posters," said Marcie, "do you want one?"

¨Well, yeah, but..."

"Come on." Marcie turned around and chased after the guy. "Señor, por favor, mon amigo, aime, oh, how do you say 'like'?..." We had a brief discussion about whether it was quiero or not, and the guy caught on that we'd like one of the posters. He peeled off two and gave them to me.

So I had one poster for me and one for someone else. And somehow, Marcie was interested in it.

"Oh, no, Marcie, this poster is too ugly for your wall. Only the most beautiful poster is good enough for you," I said. But Marcie didn't really want it. Beverly does. And she was there, so sorry, she's getting it.

But if any of you would like a free 6"x14" bullfighting poster, I can get lots of those.

Post Script: The next morning in Malaga, all the shoe posters had been covered with other concert posters. Every single one.

El Canto del Loco Links:

• Official site (warning automatically plays music)
• Wikipedia
• A Google Video
• Some samples