Hamaiketako

This is my favorite Basque word that I've learned thus far. An Hamaiketako is like an early lunch, it's when you eat delicious food at 11am. Hamaike means 11, and tako? I don't know, but I like to imagine that it means delicious food.

So this week I've had two hamaiketakos at school. The first one was with my favorite and smallest (only 7 kids) class. It was potluck style and they were all so cute with the things they made. Everything from tuna sandwiches to muffins to tortilla. I brought chocolate chip cookies and one kid (one of the many Jon's, a basque name which is amusingly pronounced like 'yawn') was all "Oh, it's like chips ahoy." I responded in a friendly manner but I thought "Oh, you poor boy, you are only exposed to lame american culture. These cookies are NOT like chips ahoy."

The second hamaiketako (how many times I can I use this word in one post? well, let's see)was with my fellow teachers in celebration of a few birthdays (god only knows who's). This one was just so overwhelmingly Spanish, what with the tortilla de bacalo, the chorizo, the ridiculous amounts of bread and oh, did I mention the wine? Yeah, there was wine. Can you imagine the entire faculty of an American high school drinking wine together in the middle of a school day? Yeah, I can't either.

So, yes, my life here definitely revolves around food. And speaking of which: Happy Thanksgiving! We are doing a cute little ex-pat style dinner tonight and yesterday I made 3 pies (2 pumpkin and 1 apple) for the occaision, so I'm pretty psyched. Oooh and we used the extra pie dough to make these amazing little vegetable empanada things. Just the dough filled with sautéed mushrooms, onions, eggplant and spinach. Way better then the sugar-cinnamon cracker things that I usually use extra dough for. I highly recommend them.

But, back to hamaiketakos. What I really like about this word is its elegant specificity. It's becoming clear that I'm only in the learning new languages game for moments like this, moments when you can say something in one word that your native tongue would need several words or even several clauses to express. It's Occam's razor for words. Why say 'to take advantage of' when you can use 'aprovechar?' Why say 'food that you eat at 11am, that's not lunch because you'll still eat lunch at like 2 or 3 and certainly isn't brunch because everything is savory and probably includes wine because why wouldn't you want to have some wine half way through the morning' when you can say 'hamaiketako' and call it good? Also, why not say 'hamaiketako' all the time? It's fun.