Laundry & Truco

As time goes by, I tend to have fewer new adventures because I am settling into more of a routine. This past week, there were just two notable moments. The first was the test of ingenuity we had to pass in order to dry our clothes, and the second was learning how to play truco.

Clothesline. There is really nowhere in the apartment to dry clothes and, upon first consideration, nothing to tie a clothesline to. Of course the lavandería has dryers, but there are some shirts and jeans that I don't dry to avoid their inevitable shrinking. To solve this problem, Giselle and I went to the grocery store to buy a drying rack but found that they cost between $20 and $55 US (side note: certain merchandise here seems to be quite a bit more expensive than in the U.S.). Instead, we decided to buy rope for $2 US and see what we could come up with. After a failed experiment to reproduce a drying rack with the rope and chairs (too unstable), we realized that there is a ladder in the apartment that is the perfect height for a clothesline. We were able to use to create our own version of a clothesline using the ladder and a rod in the wardrobe. I felt pretty good about the results.

Truco. Just like the clase de cocina in which I learned how to make empanadas, the Intercultural offered an activity in which I could learn how to play truco. I don't even know how to begin explaining what it is or how it works---I ended up taking about 7 pages of notes as my teacher was going over the highly complex rules.

It's a combination of a hearts/spades-like game in which you take tricks and a poker-like game in which you make bets and try to bluff your opponents. But the first thing that I had to get used to was the Spanish deck of cards (naipes) that we used. Instead of the French deck with hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades it has copas (wine glasses), bastones (clubs), espadas (swords), and oro (gold).

The next thing to learn is the value order of the cards (i.e., what trumps what). Once I could play a simple hand based on the cards' values, I learned how to make bets about (a) whether I could going to win the hand and (b) whether I had a pair of symbols (i.e. 2 golds) that add up to more than my opponents pair of symbols (i.e. 2 clubs).

I had so much fun learning to play, that I immediately bought my own deck. Now I need to find someone who will play with me before I forget everything I learned.