Play of the day

In Buenos Aires, as in many mega-metropoleis*, you can get pretty much anything in the world delivered. Liters of beer, cigarettes, groceries, pizza, gelato, even a single cup of hot coffee and a medialuna can be yours in forty-five minutes or less if you’ve got a phone and an address. It’s incredible.

The other fantastic thing about delivery here is that it’s called ‘delivery.’ They do not use a Spanish word for this fine commercial service. Plain ol’ English suffices–almost. The word must be pronounced as it would be in the local tongue. You ask for ‘deh-lee-behr-ee.”

I, dearest readers, finally worked up the courage to order my own delivery the other day. A courageous act, it was, because talking on the phone in Spanish is considerably more difficult than having an exchange face-to-face. When you don’t hear well or don’t understand, it can be a challenge to recover without the aid of facial expressions or emphatic gestures, pointing and the like. (And oh how the porteños love their gestures.)

I gulped. I called. I asked for a ‘deh-lee-behr-ee’ and forty minutes later two liters of beer and a bottle of Malbec arrived. Huzzah! That’s urban magic.

I didn’t actually require these items to be delivered (they were for a dinner party I hosted the following evening and I could have just as easily purchased the booze at the store next door), but hey. Sometimes minor adventures have to be chosen.

So. There you have it. A well played play of the day. Next time I think I’ll order a kilo of mint-chip along with a café con leche. Let’s hope I don’t get used to it. We wouldn’t want to have to change the title of this little blog to ‘Agoraphobic Me’.

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*I realize this is the alternative plural. I chose it because it is awesome. That is all.