LEARNED A NEW WORD TODAY: CHÁCHARA
Click photo above for a slide show of all the taxi driver’s chácharaLast Sunday, August 24, 2008, as I was leaving a flea market, a “tianguis” as it is called here, I hailed a cab to leave. As I got into the taxi I noted lots of stuff on the dashboard. I said wow, what is that all about and the driver said it was “cháchara.” I guess a Spanish slang word for junk.
(Note: Today, August 31, 2008, I received a note from Cristina of Mexico Cooks! to inform me that cháchara means, “small second-hand stuff, not necessarily junk. Like tchotchkes, in Yiddish, or knickknacks, in English.” Well thank you Cristina for the Spanish lesson because I am always willing to learn. I also checked out Mexico Cooks! blog site and it is about Mexico’s food and a nice place to visit and learn. )
The taxi driver was leaving the flea market the same time I was and he told me he always goes to that market I was leaving to cháchara or he said he was cháchareando. He said that some of those people at the market sometimes don’t know they have something of value so he can sometimes gets things real cheap.
Well from you can see from the pics, he has lots of stuff. What I liked most about this ride was that the driver even picked up some of the pieces off of his dash to show me and to give me special detail of each item he had bought — each item on this dash has a story of appreciation.
The taxi driver really got energized that I wanted to take pictures; evident that no one had taken a big fascination in his pastime before. What can I say, I LOVE Cháchara so KITSCH.
