We went to the doctor the other day to get a letter for a medical condition so that the airline wouldn’t give us a hassle flying the US.
He was super nice and wrote the letter for us. I had a look at it, and, surprise, he had written the thing in Catalan.
He got a bit confused when we told him that a letter in Catalan wouldn’t really be very useful for us since no one outside of Catalunya would be able to read it.
In the end we managed to convince him to write it again in Spanish.
4 comments:
If you don't like it here why do you have to come back? Why do you expect people here to tolerate you if you don't respect their language?
The point was that the for a international travel, a medical certificate written in Catalan is totally useless, and the fact that the doctor didn't realize this was a bit strange.
Sometimes I lie in bed at night, dreaming about the Independent Catalonia discourse progressing beyond the oft-demonstrated "if you don't like the way I think; leave". Unfortunately, in the more realistic light of day, I have to acknowledge that a people so entrenched in routine as to doggedly insist on independent nationhood, 300 odd years of history notwithstanding, are unlikely to come up with an original argument just to keep me on my conversational toes.
They do everything in Catalan ! That is even when they've contacted me for picking up some documents from the office called the "International Welcome Point" (!) which takes care of the issues and residence permits of International students in UAB. You see the irony? It's just so Welcoming to International students! I mean what are the chances of us actually being able to speak Catalan?! It could have at least be in Castellano so that the Latin American students would be OK with it !
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