Rant-grade Spanish

I'm pretty sure there was a time when I thought that if I could just speak Spanish well enough to buy a bus ticket without pain, that would be enough. The tickets always got bought, but bus stations are loud and chaotic and you're often talking to someone behind a window so it's really hard to hear and the person behind the counter is usually at least a little gumpy which never helps anything, and I used to fuck it up most of the time. I don't fuck it up very much anymore, which is nice. But the smoothness of bus station transactions is a pretty ridiculous way to measure one's language skills; foreigners gesture and grunt and use their fingers to buy bus tickets in languages they don't speak all the time. And since I'll never be a native speaker, I'll probably never really be satisfied with my Spanish skills. Even so, I've found a new bar for what seems like it might be enough: I want to be able to rant. A good rant is funny and entertaining and so very satisfying (if you're the one doing the ranting, anyway). I heard two good ones today, which is what made me realize that my own Spanish isn't rant-grade yet.

I wanted to buy La Vanguardia, the Barcelona newspaper -- Barcelona beat Madrid in soccer last night and I figured the Barcelona paper would have more coverage than the Bilbao paper -- but the newsstands were all sold out of it. I didn't make the connection, but then the woman at the third newsstand I tried started going on about how no one reads the news except for sports and La Vanguardia only sells after Barça games and something important could happen and no one would know unless it happened right after a football game. It was a good rant. (Maybe because I'm a foreigner or maybe because I'm a girl, it didn't seem directed at me, even though I was mostly interested in the sports section.) And then my Spanish teacher got started on the pope's visit. "Do you know how much this is costing? The government says it's a state visit not a church visit and that's why the state is paying for it, but they don't pay when other heads of state come, and he's coming to preach not to do state business. And it's not like people from out of town are bringing in money -- the government is paying to put them up in empty schools and feed them. They even get special pilgrim cards that let them ride the metro for free. But regular Madrileños still have to pay for the metro. And they just raised the fare!" Something to aspire to.

And speaking of the friggin' papa, after all that boring repetitive news coverage of pilgrims camped out in schools, now that he's finally here people really seem a lot more interested in the Barça-Madrid game.