Chico's Spanish Word Of The Day
12-18-97
This edition of Chico's "Palabra"
is precious! For those of you who don't know, Chico at McMurdo writes an
extremely casual e-mail column every couple of days, and his readers end
up on his mailing list by serendipity. Enjoy!
Here's Chico:
Buenos dias everyone. Today we are one week away from Christmas. And here
in McMurdo Station we're still waiting on our mail that has been sitting
in ChristChurch, New Zealand for some time now. Unfortunately some people
won't get what they are expecting as some of it was returned to the senders.
It's sunny outside with a low fog over the vicinity except for Mctown. The
visibility in the fog is at 0 and it's Condition II at the Williams Field
runway. The South Pole flight and the one from ChristChurch that landed
this morning had to land a few miles away from the air strip because...they
couldn't find it and had to land. It's another day in Antarctica where surprises
aren't surprising. Yesterday's high was at 37 above zero. Currently the
temperature is at 30 but the wind is picking up and the windchill temperature
is dropping. Today's Spanish word of the day is:
"Gallina(gah-yee-naw)."
Which means: "Chicken." If you love chicken than you need to come
to Antarctica. We don't raise them here. We just eat 'em. From Monday of
this week to tomorrow, we will have eaten Chicken Marsala, Chicken Provencal,
chicken nuggets, Chicken Breast Szcheran, Chicken-ala-Orange, Chicken-n-Sour,
Chicken on sour sauce. No kidding. We eat chicken baked, grilled, stuffed,
thrown, dropped, kicked and runned over. For breakfast we have eggs. For
dinner we eat the chicken that laid it. We're worse than renegade foxes.
You sneeze and a feather blows out of your nose. We don't drink chicken
because someone hasn't figured out yet a way to get them up a straw. If
they do they might be eligible for a TQM (Total Quality Management) award
that people down here get when they think of ways to save the program money.
Someone somewhere is living like a sheik from all the chickens they sold
to the United States Antarctic Program. Someone somewhere is probably a
vegetarian.
The Spanish phrase of the day is from a 15 year
old on what she learned: "Yo aprendi que si e quieres contender, deverias
de contender a otro." Which means: "I've learned that if you want
to cheer yourself up, you should cheer someone else up." Enough said.
Have a great day. Chico. over.
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