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Saturday, December 4, 2010

¡Todavía amo telenovelas españolas!

Years ago I somehow got hooked on Spanish soap operas - I have no idea how that happened but it did. I ended up taking a Spanish class at the local library just so I could figure out who stole Esperanza and Phillip's baby and better yet, why she was hiding in a cave. A couple of months ago I was in a DVD store and saw a pile of Spanish DVDs on clearance and on impulse, bought one. I have a portable player that I use while I'm on my elipse so I can watch while I worked out.  I just finished  En Nombre De Amore (In the name of love) - I thought I could brush up on my Spanish which I haven't used in years - but I gave in after the first 3 episodes and turned on the subtitles.  You're probably wondering what's so great about these as opposed to the ones we have in the US.  Spanish soaps do not run for years, they run for about 4 to 6 months, they tie up all the loose ends, and the bad guys get what they deserve. They run heavy on the religion, priests tend to be central characters that have some secret romantic past.  The lead character 99% of the time is a Chaste Young Woman that everyone picks on, her best friend will always plot to steal her One True Love, there will be at least one or two sleazy men to attempt to turn her head, and of course the Bad One will spend the entire course of the story pounding on our heroine. In this soap Aunt Charlota was bad, her niece Paloma was good.  Aunt Charlota: killed her dog, blamed her parent's death on her (they turned out not be her parents later on) she stole her inheritance, killed her real mother (that would be Aunt Charlota's sister Marcerna), killed her first fiance, plotted with Paloma's best friend to trick Paloma's boyfriend into thinking he had fathered the best friend's child,  drugged and took pictures of the priest in a compromising position (that was Paloma's real father), shot and tried to kill the local doctor, killed the dead fiance's father after he found out she had killed his son, killed Paloma's friend at her wedding, tried to shoot the priest, tried to kill Paloma by pushing her down the stairs AND killed the maid. My Spanish is no better but I have realized it's entirely possible to knock off half the town before anyone figures it was you.  Through out The Chaste Young Woman keeps her chin up, forgives as she goes along and gets rewarded in the end - the Bad One gets punished appropriately and that's the end - what's not to like? In other news, my foot continues to heal, I am going to attempt a walk tomorrow morning, I would do it this morning but we have errands and I need to replace the batteries in Pearl's electric collar. She's much better but still would like to eat a small dog at some point in her life. My luck she was eat a triple crown winner and I would have to sell my car to replace it. I've started a new project - twice - I'm attempting the Shipwreck Shawl from Knitty.com and it's pretty complicated. The only bad thing is I'm using actually mohair yarn lace weight so when you rip it back all those natural fibers clump and cling which meant repeated stopping, teasing it apart, rip, stop, pull, start, etc. It took almost as long to frog it as it did to knit it!

1 comment:

Sinéad said...

Lol! I love your synopsis of the sopa opera. I've seen a few clips of them when I've been in the States abd often wondered what they were all about. They always seem so full of drama and intrigue!