Having a coffee in the center around 4PM proved itself a difficult task, since all the coffee places were full of people getting out of work. We settled on walking a bit further to cafe Pala, a quieter place inside the Finlayson building.
We both already have some skills in the languages we want to learn, so for this first meeting we ended up just talking about what kind of lessons we should have in the future, and also some random stuff that came up. As a Finn I of course asked if Ignasi knows what “pala” means in Finnish. He did know it means “a piece”, and I learned that “pala” in Spanish means a shovel. The more you know.
Consequently he also knew the Finnish word for hangover (krapula), and taught me the Spanish word for it, which is resaca. I ended up teaching him a couple more words for hangover (kankkunen, darra, kohmelo…) , since we seem to have plenty, while Spanish only uses one. Probably the product of our multitude of dialects.
We talked about kiosks in our countries, since even though R-kioskis are literally everywhere in Finland, they are still (to Ignasi’s surprise) a franchise, not a state owned business like in Spain. I was curious about who the lucky bastard is that actually owns the R-kioskis if it’s not the state, and after a brief google search I found out they’re owned by a parent company based in Norway?? What the.
I also now know that there are two kinds of banks in Spain. The ones called “banco” are ones trying to turn a profit (so corporations basically) and ones called “caja” (caja literally translates to “box”) are what I think most Finnish banks are, so like a savings bank.
One more thing that stood out for me was finding out that the Spanish days of the week derive from the names of the Roman gods, aka, what we know as the names of the planets. I had never thought about it, but once he told me it seemed so obvious (Martes = Mars, Miercoles = Mercury, and so on).
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