La TV

Dan: On cable TV here you can see a lot of American TV shows, maybe a season or two later, and movies in English, with Spanish subtitles. There is always at least one soccer game on (did you know there was a FIFA World Cup of Beach Soccer?). For better or for worse, we have only two channels. On weekends they tend to play hollywood movies, with Spanish voiceovers. Out of boredom and in hopes of improving our listening comprehension, we sometimes end up watching movies we wouldn’t normally sit through. “The Next Karate Kid,” “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” and last weekend two fine films from the Tim Allen collection. And as I think we mentioned before, the Argentine version of Big Brother seems to be on all the time, but I still don’t understand it. There are a couple of game shows along the variety of the one Howie Mandel hosts (I can’t remember the name), and at around the same intellectual level. Also, I try to catch episodes of “Lost” when I can. Generally TV hasn’t played that great a role in out lives here. I don’t even know what time the news is on. Yesterday I had to go to Mr. Dog to watch the Liverpool/ Chelsea game.

As far as Dan and Louann are concerned, the only TV show of any value is Zorro: La Rosa y la Espada. It is a telenovela (soap opera) based on the story of El Zorro. It comes on at 2:00 every day, so we catch it maybe twice per week. Some days one of us will see the show and have to fill in to the other with what happened. Maybe it’s like this with every soap opera, but even missing three episodes per week, we never get lost with what’s happening in the story. Even without understanding any Spanish, I think a person could follow the basic story line. Even if I were completely deaf, I’d know which characters were the evil ones (the blond colonel with the chin beard, the red-haired vixen, the guy with an eye-patch). The production and musical soundtrack are better than all the other novelas The theme song is sung by Beyonce. The show is completely cheesy and dramatic, full of double-crosses and deceptions. Each character has multiple love interests. In every episode somebody secretly overhears a private conversation and uses the information for some nefarious purpose. Diego de la Vega doesn’t even don the Zorro mask every week, but there is plenty of swordplay and cleavage-bearing wardrobes to keep the fellas watching.

A message to my friends from the Costa Rica program of 1993: I think I have finally discovered the Spanish equivalent for the word “cheesy.” I think that here the word “cursi” is used in a similar way. Finally we can describe Ricky Martin!