Ever tried seseando?
For my second guest blogging post at Metropolitan, I wonder about the urban myth of the Castilian lisp…and how bloody hard it is to spit out.
Why can’t I sesear?
“In the spirit of the new year, I’m setting out to try something completely novel every week. Walking on stilts, mental arithmetic, cooking with salt.
To ease myself in I decided to join our sibilant South American cousins and drop the ‘th’ sound with which I was taught to pepper my Spanish sentences. Brilliant, I thought – why haven’t I tried this before? No longer will I have to take time out in meetings to mentally practise pronouncing ‘organithathiones’ before composing the sentence. My life will be simpler in one fell swoop.
Just one morning of seseando and I realise that it’s not so much a tongue twister as a mind bender. So what’s the background to this quirky phonetic phenomenon?”
Read full piece on Metropolitan’s site
Guiri is one of those words, like feminist or peely-wally, that I want to reclaim. Locals use it to refer to tourists - you know the ones - who stick out a million miles. No matter how long I live in Barcelona, that's always going to be me. (P.S. While Barça locally refers to the football team, Brits use Barca as shorthand for the whole city.) 
