Many people here, for example, even actual Mexicans and Colombians etc., are a bit annoyed - and sometimes maybe a bit "confused" - by how the folks living in actual Spain speak Spanish.
I have been told this by a few Mexican friends I've talked to now. It isn't so much that the folks in Spain are not understandable--of course not--but rather that it's fairly different, and they use different phrases, and a different sort of "rhythm" too. If you search Google for pirated movies, for example, you will often see, on Spanish pirate sites, that the sites always have 3 versions of the same film to watch: One is in "Catalan", which is for the folks in Spain, the next is in "Latino", obviously for the folks here in Latin America, and the last is often just subtitled, with the original (often English) audio.
I myself, because I learned Italian from a fellow who lives in Florence, Italy, can understand the Catalan significantly better than I can the Latin American stuff. In fact, one of the reasons I first got inspired to try the language, was because I was watching an interview in Italian with an old singer, and the guy giving the interview was talking Spanish, and the singer was replying in Italian. My mind was blown, especially because I basically understood the interviewer.
WHat I did not realize at the time, though, was that he was speaking in this "Catalan". I quickly came to discover this, once I tried to tune in to various programs from Latin America and couldn't understand a bloody word. My mission at that point became clear: Whenever I start fuckin' with Spanish, I'll fuck with it in its Latin American version. Screw Spain! What care I for Spain? Don't they still have a monarchy? Pendejos!!
Cracking jokes about Spain is actually part of the great fun of talking to all those folks living below Texas, though, on some real shit. Every time I meet a new friend, I always ask them that question at some point throughout the first night of our conversation: "How do you feel about...Spain?"
The responses are mixed. Some of them have actually written to me that they hate it.. oh yea...and others are just totally indifferent. Many of them all seem to agree that people in Spain "don't really speak Spanish correctly" though. Which - again - is hilarious. "Tienen acentos extrano..." Translation: they have strange accents!!!!
I should very much like to live in Latin America if I could, it seems more down my alley as an old Italiano with my tomato sauce and my bread soaked in olive oil and garlic, but of course the North Americans have essentially done everything in their power to destroy it, and make sure it looks like an absolutely horrifc place. Mostly they have done this via the War on Drugs....in Spanish ... la guerra contro las drogas. It should come as no surprise that the War on Drugs, whilst it has had quite a negative effect on the North American cities , has completely decimated Latin America. Juarez, for example,is basically hell on Earth.
Many Latin American countries are regularly rated the most dangerous in the entire world. This is all almost entirely thanks to the US and its tyrannical drug war. You think the black ghetto in Chicago is bad? Go to Juarez. It gets worse. Down there they'll cut your head off in the middle of the street and nobody will be able to do anything about it, because drug lords rule the entire city and have flipped the government on its side. One woman I was talking to in Chihuahua, Mexico (yes, a real place, and its a state in the north, actually) explained to me how "..I don't feel comfortable walking around anywhere here... because I'm afraid I'll be kidnapped by the cartel...and never seen again.." This happens regularly in the world below Texas.
Again, for an Italian, this whole bit about the gangsters taking over the city and hanging the government is a bit of a familiar story: My ancestors fled Naples for this exact reason, because the city is not run so much by a stable govt., as she is by gangsters and mafioso. For an Italian,especially a Neapolitan, the idea that any given day, could be the day the government loses total control over the city and it flips into the hands of the gangsters, is not at all difficult to believe. For "y'all" traditional North Americans though, I have often found that this is hard to believe. Essentially 'y'all' seem convinced that your legions of cops, soldiers, DEA agents, federals, and so forth, will be able to contain the mess, eternally. The evidence, however, as far as the War on Drugs is concerned, points elsewhere: The North Americans are losing this war more and more every day. And when I say "losing", I don't mean that more and more of your dumb kids are shooting dope and finding it easier to locate, I mean you're losing control over your own cities and your own states -- just like Juarez already has. Each day that passes, is another day where the power of the gangs continues to grow. If the North American tyrants do not end the war soon, it is totally within reason to think that their cities will collapse, like dominoes, in the same fashion that the Latin ones have. Many of them are already close: Detroit, Saint Louis, Chicago, New Orleans, and a few other N. American cities regularly feature on the same lists of "the wotlds most dangerous", too. You will have an entire nation of shit cities that resemble Naples and Rio de Janeiro and Juarez. All thanks to the War on Drugs....
It will be a sad day, indeed, the day I talk to an American girl, and I get the same story that I got from the Mexican one, about how she's too afraid to go walking outside, for fear that some local drug lord, who has murdered the Mayor, is going to kidnap her, to rape her to death. But alas, I don't suppose I myself will be doing much talking either at that point.
And isn't it sad that a conversation that began about the beauty of the Spanish language turned into this??? Gotta hand it to the United States tyrants. They sure do know how to ruin everyhing good in the world. Tyrannical fucking pendejos.
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