Que? Como te llamas?
"Hard at work, Omar Valdovinos picks apples from deciduous fruit trees at Riley Orchards in Genola, Tuesday afternoon. Rusty Newton (not pictured), who was in charge of the operations for the day and was also transporting large crates of apples to storage, said that the nine man crew will fill and move more than 90 crates Tuesday afternoon."After spending all morning not understanding my subject, things didn't get any easier as the afternoon rolled around.
I needed to find a feature and was told to head south to the Genola area where all the orchards were.
Feeling like the weather and season, I searched around the apple fields. It was a cool 70 degrees and the aroma of apples could be smelled from my car. All I wanted was some apple cider.
After failing for a good 20 minutes, I finally stumbled across some workers. I pulled my car into the field and told Rusty Newton, a worker, who I was.
"Sure, go ahead out there," he said. "Just know, not one of them speaks English."
Oh, great. My Spanish sucks. I blame it on my high school teacher. She always had a personal vendetta out for me and was never willing to help me.
So I trekked back, crushing rotten apples as I walked through the trees, until I heard some Spanish singing.
"Que pasa," I said confidently, and then began shooting.
After sometime, and many failed conversations with the workers in the field, I used the only phrase I knew would actually be helpful, and that I knew what it meant.
Como te llamas? Or "What's your name" in English.
Thankfully it worked. But I couldn't wait to get back to the office to speak about things and languages I knew. It had been a long day of confusion.
posted by Patrick Smith at 4:42 AM
2 Comments:
sour pickles and rotten apples.
I wonder what's next...
Nice pix
This happened to me recently. My Spanish used to be quite good when I still used it, but since I moved and started my job at the RNT over a year ago, it's gone downhill (we pretty much ignore the Spanish speaking population at our paper). Some days I still do pretty well. Some days... not so much. A couple months ago I was shooting a church party at Silver Creek at I got some nice photos of a Guatemalan family playing in the creek. Once I got through the "Hi I'm Lindy and I'm a photographer for the newspaper" and "Can I take your pictures" and other heyhowareyas, I thought I was in the clear.
And then they asked me if I was going to swim when I got done working. I'm pretty sure I told something along the lines of No, I was going to pee in the creek and then hide in my office.
Yeeeahhh... At least they had a good sense of humor about it. Ha.
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