Isa....not "Lisa" from the Simpsons

Spanish people do not understand the letter "z." It is only pronounced in a select few words, and generally resembles more or an "s" sound. My host father has a particularly hard time with this, and decided to refer to me as the Spanish translation of my name, Isabel. For short, I am Isa. This is humorous, especially because of the complete lack of resemblance I have to the over-sized-basketball-jersey-wearing 4th grader I tutored in Schenectady, also named Isa.

Julia, the three year old, does her best to pronounce my name, but it generally comes out sounding Asian. She screams "Leeeeeeeee" which I now recognize as my name. She also makes the connection with my name and "Lisa from the Simpsons" and every time they say the name "Lisa" during the program, the little girl screams "Los nombres son iguales" (the names are the same) and throws her head back in a fit of laughter for about 2 minutes. Since Lisa is a frequent character, us watching the Simpsons usually just turns into us watching Julia belly laugh for 30 minutes.

Anyway, my host father suffered a pretty harsh case of meningitis about 5 years ago. He was in the hospital and in a coma for a good amount of time, and has lost a little bit of his memory. According to him, he's 80% back to normal. You probably wouldn't notice anything different unless you know, but he does speak slower than most Spaniards, and often forgets the names of things. I'll ask him what the name is for the eggplant we are eating, and he usually responds with "I forget what that's called, but what is this thing?" and then I'll say "Son guisantes" (those are peas). It's fine, though. I tell him we'll learn the Spanish language together and then he usually laughs and calls me a smart one.

Anyway, Alejandro is quite the musician, and played guitar and sang in flamenco bars back in the day. He is always singing in the house, and gives guitar lessons to his nephew on the weekends. He has forgotten a lot of songs and has had to re-train the muscles in his hands since the meningitis. Whenever Suzie (the Irish exchange student in our house) walks into a room, he bursts out into a Spanish song called "Susana." Not knowing any equivalent to sing upon my entrance, he usually just starts repeating the word "Ameeeerica" in a harmonic tone.

Today I was getting ready to go out for the afternoon, when Alejandro bursts into the room (he has never been in our room before, so we were a little taken back) and starts singing extremely loudly and dancing in our room. It was a song about putting your sombrero on at the beach, and the chorus included a shout out to a woman named Maria Isabel." We got a refrain two or three times, and Rachel and I clapped and said "Bravo" but were also so taken back by this man screaming and dancing around our room. We had no idea what spawned this. He supported himself against the wall for a breather, and eventually told us that he had spontaneously recovered memory of the song just 5 minutes ago, and knew he had to show it to us since it was "my song", as it contained the word "Isabel." This made a little more sense now, but it was still so surprising. Now I have a song for him to sing to me!

He is honestly a great guy, and we've gotten to know him the most, as we eat all our our meals with him, and only occasionally with our house mom. He is so kind, and always says that "they are very lucky to have gotten such nice Americans, but WE really won the lottery living with them." It's true, but its funny to hear him say that. He also tells us he will cry when we leave and that he will miss us. We reply with a "you too" comment, which actually makes no sense, since they aren't going to be leaving any time soon (think Brian Regan's 'you too' segment). But its the only thing we can think of to say.

He's a great guy! And is teaching me to cook like a true Sevillano!

Hasta luego