Metro lessons in understanding. And misunderstanding

There are times when I wonder why I ever take the car into central Valencia. It’s not so much the traffic, though that can be a pain (it’s sad how few cars around here seem to be fitted with working indicators), but more a matter of finding a parking space once there. That can take practically as long as the drive in.

Our metro station. A sight worth seeing in its own right

Besides, our local metro station is in a forest. Not a pleasure to pass up, is it? That’s why when I picked up two Croatian friends who were coming to stay, I went by metro instead of by car, even though it meant hauling a case through the woods afterwards. It was a chore, but a small price to pay for a woodland welcome…

“So,” said one of the friends, “what’s the name of the final destination of this train?”

The station is called ‘Lliria’. That initial double-l always intimidates me. It’s as worrying in Spanish as it is in Welsh. For the Spaniards, it seems to be a cross between the ‘j’ in ‘you’re joking’ and the ‘y’ in ‘you’re kidding’, but quite where in between I have trouble deciding.

Still, I’d heard the name many times. I had an answer to the question.

“Liria,” I told him.

Was that right, though? A double ‘l’ pronounced as though it were single?

On the train, as in most countries, a small minority was absorbed in conversation, another reading, another just staring blankly into space. The vast majority were glued to their phones.

One woman had been separated from her friends by the arbitrary emptying of seats. She’d shifted from absorption in conversation to blank staring. She started to pull out a phone, but before she could get focused, I seized my opportunity.

“Excuse me,” I asked, “how do you pronounce the name of this train’s destination?”

She looked momentarily shocked. A stranger? Talking to her? In a metro? But she gathered her thoughts quickly.

“Where are you trying to go?”

“No, no. I don’t want to go there. I just want to know how to pronounce it.”

“You want to know how to pronounce Liria?”

That was quite helpful. A question that contained the answer to mine. Clearly I’d got it right.

Then, however, her friend, two seats away intervened.

“Jiria?”

Of course, she may have said ‘Yiria’. But I heard ‘Jiria’. And, either way, I was back at square one. Was the town called ‘Liria’ or ‘Jiria/Yiria’?

The first woman, now smiling as she understood that I was just a foreigner trying to come to terms with the language, came to my rescue.

“Liria in Castilian. Jiria in Valencian.”

That may have been ‘Yiria’, but I’d got the message. The town’s name was different in Castilian (the Spanish national language) or Valencian (the regional language).

“Don’t worry,” she went on, “we’re not racists in Valencia. You can talk Castilian to us and we’ll answer in the same language. We’re not like the Catalans.”

Valencians aren’t keen on being confused with Catalans. Their language, Valencian, many like to point out, is absolutely not Catalan. For the record, one Valencian friend we asked quickly checked that no one was listening, before telling us that, in all honesty, Valencian really is Catalan.

The reference to Catalans made the conversation more general, as people dived into the current hot topic in Spain, the campaign for independence in Catalonia and the demonstrations, some with outbreaks of violence, that followed stiff gaol sentences handed out to some of the leaders. In Valencia and, I suspect, in most of Spain outside Catalonia, there’s not a lot of sympathy for the independence movement, and the people in the metro were no exception. One woman spoke up for the notion that the national government could, perhaps, use velvet gloves a little more, rather than mailed fists, but she didn’t get much support.

I used to be quite keen on the Catalan case, since they seemed to be something of a different nation, with their own language and traditions, but since the Brexit torment started, I’ve rather cooled on the idea of people walking away from the wider organisation they belong to, just because they can’t be bothered to help reform it.

My Croatian friends had just come from Barcelona. We shared their news that while there was indeed some violence in the city, it was localised and most places were quiet. Everyone nodded at that and made some comments about journalists always focusing on the bad news, but they quickly got back to the more interesting topic of how annoying the Catalans were.

Some Catalans making a point
Not all Spaniards are wholly in favour, though

That didn’t last long, though. The women noticed the young lads across the carriage were eating some kind of multi-coloured hoops, out of a plastic bag. Cereal perhaps, but as one of the women said, it looked like the kind of thing she might feed to her cat. I’d just be thinking that it could have been dog food, but that was close enough.

The lads were courteous and offered the bag around. There were no takers, though. Perhaps we all felt that we didn’t really belong to the right species for the stuff.

The woman I’d first spoken to got off the train before us. She waved as she left and wished us a good evening.

“The language lesson was free,” she said. “A Catalan would have charged for it.”

With those words she left me amused at how easy it was to break down the barriers between fellow travellers on a train, at how friendly relations could be between people from three different countries with three different languages, and at how that contrasted with the animosity on display towards people from just up the road who spoke a language practically identical to their own.

Metro trips are much more fun than car journeys. And so much more instructive.