#mambear

Since I'm not doing an extra month of immersion in Buenos Aires before my program starts, I've decided to start blogging a bit about my "virtual" immersion in the city. Also, I realized that I need to start practicing some Spanish (or "Castellano" for Argentina I guess, which is different and I will explain later) and a fun way to do that would be to listen to music/watch movies/read stories (look at pictures of Gael Garcia Bernal) rather than just do mind-numbing exercises from my textbook, although that would probably be more beneficial when it comes to my placement test. Who knows, it's better than nothing.

Onda Vaga - I found them when I searched for "La Blogotheque Buenos Aires" on YouTube just to see if there were any takeaway shows there. Sure enough, this group had about 5 videos of them playing, walking around the streets and various plazas. This video is really cute and I can actually understand some of the words...I think? I don't know, when I listen to Spanish I can usually pick out words I understand but I still have trouble stringing everything together, but in a song its nice because I can digest everything phrase by phrase, and things are usually repeated.

The title of the song "Mambeado"..hmmm what does that mean? Well Word Reference didn't turn up any search results, but on the forums someone suggested that it is a variation of the word "mambo" or the genre and another suggested it means "to get high." Well, that's probably closer to the truth. "Mambeado" is the past participle of the verb "mambear" which means "to chew coca."

At first, I wasn't sure if this was an instance of the Argentina slang known as "Lunfardo" which is a combination of Castellano and Italian. No, because the Italians probably weren't the ones chewing coca, it was the natives.

According to the blog bussinessland:

The activity of chewing coca is called mambear, chacchar or acullicar, borrowed from Quechua, or in Bolivia, picchar, derived from the Aymara language....A few leaves are chosen to form a quid (acullico) held between the mouth and gums. Doing so usually causes users to feel a tingling and numbing sensation in their mouths. (The common dental anaesthetic Novocaine has a similar effect.) Chewing coca leaves is most common in indigenous communities across the central Andean region, particularly in places like the highlands of Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru, where the cultivation and consumption of coca is as much a part of the national culture similar to chicha, like wine is to France or beer is to Germany. It also serves as a powerful symbol of indigenous cultural and religious identity, amongst a diversity of indigenous nations throughout South America.

So there you have it. "Mambear" basically means "to get high." I don't think the lyrics are literally about getting high with coca, maybe getting high in a more natural way (singing, looking at the stars, tus amigos ... yadda yadda)? Not sure, I haven't really analyzed them yet and that might be another day. (Don't worry  mom, I hopefully won't be using this verb in my studies, but it will be good to know). But what I do love about learning Spanish right now is learning the words that aren't really cognates, or derived from the same Latin root as the English word. It's the ones that are Arabic, Guarani, Quechua and Italian influenced that are easier to remember for me once I really understand the root origin and history of it. Fun stuff.