I’ve been glued to telenovelas (Mexican soap operas) since I arrived in Cancún. They are full of glamorous women with big hair and bigger earrings, men with big moustaches and bigger eyebrows and high drama of the highest order. They have names like HERIDAS DE AMOR (love injuries) and LAZOS DE AMOR (love knots), and someone seems to die in every episode because of love, revenge or a combination of the two.
Loud music cuts in at every moment of drama, such as when somebody announces that they love somebody, or alternatively that they are going to kill them. These dramatic pauses, which are normally accompanied by the television camera zooming in on the actor/actress´s face at high speed, are great for improving my mediocre Spanish, as they give me time to catch up on what has just been said, and better understand the extremely thread-bare plot.
I have noticed that there is a lot more evil laughing, thinking out aloud and standing behind doors listening to other people’s conversations than there is in Emmerdale. In the episode I just watched, a man’s mistress caught him kissing another woman. A car chase ensued, as the mistress drove a Ferrari at high speed to tell the man’s wife that he was cheating on her, and the man (who rather surprisingly had neither a moustache or bushy eyebrows) chased her in a stretch limo to try and stop her, presumably by killing her.
I say presumably, as the end credits started to roll at this point, and so now I will have to amend my travel plans tomorrow to Playa Del Carmen so I can watch the next episode to see what happens.
