Wash my brain!

Remain calm: Channel 2 has been hijacked. It used to be a pretty typical Spanish TV station: some news, some sports, some cartoons, some trashy soap operas. But when I tuned in at 10pm tonight to watch my favorite cleavage-bearing news anchor, they were showing starving kids in Africa. I could understand the narration pretty well, and it kept talking about how it's not Christian to allow such suffering to happen without trying to help. Channel 2 has become Solidaria TV. The commercials are anti-smoking and pro-exercise. After the starving children show was a short bit called Palabras de Vida (Words of Life) that talked about god and Jesus. Then there was this very boring but at least not preachy show about Colin Chapman, the guy who started Lotus racing cars, but about ten minutes into it they abruptly switched to more public service commercials and then showed Estamos contigo (We are with you). The announcer said that Estamos contigo would have mensajes del cielo, literally "messages from the sky" but I guess it probably means "messages from heaven" because tonight's theme was bautismo en agua (baptism in water).

Those of you who know me may be wondering why I lasted so long on Solidaria TV, AKA The God Channel. I could understand it. On all the shows and commercials they spoke slowly and clearly and used easy words and I could understand almost all of it. That almost never happens. I'll watch almost anything in Spanish if I can understand it; my listening skills are nowhere near good enough to allow me to be picky. There must be a lot of other people like me out there: Using TV to practice Spanish and watching whatever is most understandable. So they (you know, they) can throw whatever propaganda they want at us bad Spanish speakers; as long as it's spoken slowly and clearly, we'll probably watch. Whoa. Solidaria TV may be onto something. Expats, beware!