While reading through his New York summaries, I found this picture:
It's kind of like a line up at a police station! But it does give those of us who have never seen Torbe in real life an idea of his stature...and it does appear that he is about 6'2 or 6'3. :-)
Yo! He is tall, not specially here but I'm sure that when he had travelled to latin america many ppl was surprised. Average europeans are by far taller than sth americans. In fact many words we have here to refer them are about the heigh as "champiñones" (mushrooms) or "panchitos". DO NOT EVER USE THOSE WORDS coz they are really pejorative, much more than "yanki" or "guiri" we use with ppl from the states. Oh, the worst one is "sudaco" and we call ppl from north africa "mohameds". I'm just saying this to u bcoz u look so interested in spanish culture, and u know that usually the first things to learn are the bad ones... but those are terms really racists (like the "nigger" u use).
ReplyDeleteAnd we use the decimetric system for all. We don't know what a inch, pound or gallon are. Torbe is slighty taller than me, must be around 1.90 m.
I already thanked you for this explanation on Torbe's blog, Cliente X, but I will thank you again here. If these words that you described are even close to what we here call the "N" word...fear not. I will NEVER use them!
ReplyDeleteHere, even typing out the "N" word in full is frowned upon. People of African American heritage can say the word to each other...but if you are not African American, you simply DO NOT SAY (or even write) that word. So I understand much better now why tempers were flaring over on Torbe's blog about those comments that used the terms you described!
I know you use the metric system, as does pretty much the rest of the planet! We learn the metric system here too, but we never seem to really incorporate it into our lives. Therefore, I can't calculate conversions in my head at all. If Torbe is 1.90 meters, according to an online conversion tool that I used, that means he is 6'3 on our system of measurement...so you must be in that range too.
We haven`t so big african community here, and they are better integrated. It's sorprendent to us to see how they are segregated in some neighbours as depicted in the tv serie "The wire" (I LOVE american tv, spanish series are crap, and many of them as "Aida" or "Cuentame" are simply politic propaganda).
ReplyDeleteBut they use that word among them, and "sudaco", "champiñón" or "panchitos" are just employed in an offensive way by some spanish ppl. Like "panchitos de mierda" (literally panchitos of shit, but better translated as fuckin' panchitos).
Here the inmigrants are mainly for Romania (over one million), south america (Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil manily), north africa (Marocco and Argelia) and finally from other african countries like Nigeria. Ah and of course plenty of chineses, they are the less integrated. Altough they're very succesful in business.