¿Sabías que...?

After I left my fingerprints at the policia nacional last week as the next-to-last step in getting my residencia renewal, we went for a cup of coffee and a tostada at the café bar adjoining the parking lot right next to the police building. Going for coffee is a nice little frequent celebration in Spain. One of the lovely things about drinking coffee here is that you sit down at a table and drink your coffee from a real china cup or a clear glass cup, on a saucer. For café con leche, the coffee may come with the hot milk (and it is always hot milk that is mixed with the coffee) already in it, or occasionally, and especially at nicer places, the server comes to the table with a steaming pot of coffee and a steaming pot of milk, and pours each into your cup (usually milk first) to create the delicious and comforting drink. Whether you drink it from china or glass, it sure beats fastening your lips to the styrofoam or flimsy plastic with a hole cut out in which U.S. coffee is often delivered.

I don't drink sugar with American coffee or with the morning coffee I get in bed here in Spain, but I almost always add a bit to the strong café con leche I invariably order here when out. The sugar comes in oblong packets that are often placed on the saucer beside the spoon when serving. Sometimes two packets are placed on each saucer, though I think this hardly necessary, considering the fact that each packet holds 8 grams, and I know from an article in the Wall Street Journal that I read this week that 8 grams of sugar is roughly equivalent to two teaspoons. I know that from experience, too, as my compañero and I customarily share just one packet of sugar for both our coffees, and we may not even use a whole one.

On Tuesday this week, however, at the police station café, we got two packets of sugar each. Many sugar packets carry the brand name of the café or restaurant in which they are served; others carry the brand name of a sugar of coffee supplier. Occasionally they carry a brief quote from well-known authors or other famous people; more than once I have been amused to read the words of William Shakespeare, John Lennon, and Woody Allen in Spanish. This time the Oquendo-branded sugar packets each carried some factual information that started out ¿Sabías que---? (Did you know...?

• Did you know that the structure of the Statue of Liberty (Estatua de la Libertad) is copper with a covering of steel? "The copper has a weight of 31 tons, the steel, 125 tons. And the cement weighs 27,000 tons!" No, I didn't know that either, and although the Spanish tonelada translates in my Cambridge-Klett dictionary to "ton," I would have to look up the real weight of each and calculate the metric equivalents to see whether this statement is accurate, and from whose point of view.


• Did you know that Broadway is the longest avenue in New York, with a length of 33 kilometers? Its name is derived from the Dutch breede wegh, which means "broad road," the sugar packet tells me. I'll bet there are a lot of Americans who wouldn't know the metric length of Broadway, and that a lot of Spaniards reading this have no clue that this major U.S. city was formerly known as New Amsterdam.


• The third packet also talked about word origins.  Did you know that the Spanish word pijama (English "pyjamas" or "pajamas") comes from the Urdu "paejamah," which signifies a garment for daytime? This clothing is really a daytime outfit. It became night-time garb in England, back in the 1880s, when it was worn by colonials who returned to their homeland.

Without more research, I can't vouch for the veracity of any of these statements, but each one does provide a little curiosity to think about and talk about while sipping coffee and watching the policemen on their break. And for some, I discovered later, the little sugar packets have provided "memories of paper."