As alluded to in a previous blog post, we have to get used to Celsius, centimeters, kilograms, decimals, 24 hour clocks, etc. …
Dennis has set his weather app to show the temperature in
Celsius. I haven’t done the same yet,
but I should. I do a quick conversion in my head. I have a few key numbers
memorized: 10 C is 50 F, 20 C is 68 F, and 30 C is 86. A lot of temps around 30
C lately.
Also, when cooking, if we are using an old recipe we need to
convert to Celsius to know what to set the oven at. It doesn’t help that the
dial on the oven looks like this:
Also, measurements need to be converted to kilograms or grams. Packages of pasta in the US are usually sold by the pound (454 grams); here the typical package weight is 500 gm. If we split the package into 4 servings I’m getting an extra 11.5 grams! Fortunately, they do use tablespoons and teaspoons.
It is standard to use a 24 hour clock to indicate time.
Interestingly, morning (mañana) seems to refer to anything up to 14:00 hrs.
An interesting language note: mañana as an adverb (answering the question
“when?”) means tomorrow; mañana as a noun means morning.
This leads to the interesting phrase: “mañana por la mañana”
which means tomorrow morning.
With numbers and decimals they use commas where in US
periods are used, and vice versa.
12,700.50 in the US would be 12.700,00 in Spain
And don’t get me started about dates. I can’t get used to
the date, month, year format.
Today is July 21st which is written 21/7/2025. It
stops me every time I look at expiration dates on food. When someone asks me
for a date (such as my birthdate) I just say November 16, instead of 11/16 (or
16/11!). Somehow Dennis got into our
health insurance system with the birthdate May 6th instead of June 5th.
Since we’re not driving we don’t have to worry too much
about kilometers vs miles. However, if I’m looking up how far it is to
somewhere and I’m not using a US VPN it will be in kilometers so I have to pay
attention to that.
Salud!
Miki
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