Guides

[Crawley, Jeffrey]

50 words already, my goodness, you certainly can't be English then!!

While it's nice, and polite too, to be able to speak in Spanish it won't be vital. Por favor and muchas gracias go a long, long way and pointing, which worked well enough for you when you were 2 years old, certainly hasn't gone out of fashion yet.

A friend lent me some Spanish tapes to learn from in the car on the way in from work (Hugo's Spanish at the Wheel - a bit dated what with border controls etc, but quite good) and that worked OK.  I speak reasonable but un-grammatic French having owned a house there for some years and found I use French more than Spanish in the early stages from SJPP.

A decent, but light, phrase book would help but, for the most part, a few stock phrases will suffice.  Mainly "Dónde está(n)" - where is/are - ¿Dónde está la farmacia? <where is the chemists/pharmacy>.

Can I point you towards the BBC's language pages?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/languages/spanish/quickfix/index.shtml

and a general search for Spanish phrases on the internet can bring some useful, and some surprising, results.

Perhaps we could all contribute our favoured phrases for a Pilgrims' Phrase Book?

regards

Jeffrey

¿hay unas flechas amarillas por aqui?

PS bumped into (literally) de Coelho coming out of church in Puenta la Reina in September '01 - he was travelling with a Japanese TV crew.



-----Original Message-----
From: Kinsey Carpenter [mailto:KCarpenteraCMINS.COM]
Sent: 26 June 2003 14:51
To: GOCAMINOaPETE.URI.EDU
Subject: Guides


Recent on line chat regarding the need to know some Spanish has me a tad bit concerned as I know no more than 50 Spanish words. My departure for the Camino is mid-September. I'm rushing to get my work responsibilities in order so that I can be incommunicado with my office for 5 weeks. Hence, no time to learn any Spanish,  "Are bilingual guides available? I read "The Pilgrimage" by Paulo Coelho and was, of course, intrigued by his guide Petrus.  Please share with me your comments and recommendations as to how I would go about finding a guide. 
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