When I was a kid in New Zealand if we were digging in the sandpit or the garden the proverb was that if you kept digging through the earth you'd get all the way to Spain.
(American kids, I hear, are told they'll get to China. This is false, but no child is going to empirically disprove this lie by continuing to dig, so no harm done probably)
For whatever reason I've met more Spanish people in Minnesota (at the University to be specific) than I ever imagined. All of them report that children in Spain are told that if they keep digging they will get to New Zealand.
I think it is kind of cool that the proverbs people tell their children half a world away mirror each so neatly. It's not as if Spain looms large in the New Zealand imagination otherwise, and I imagine that New Zealand is not often on the minds of most Spaniards. Except when children are digging ...
Posted by robe0419 at July 2, 2005 06:22 PM | TrackBack