More Spanish

More language fun. We stopped at a half-way point outside of a small market. The people on the bus and in this city here are largly hispanic, so I'd been hearing a lot of Spanish throughout the bus ride. The man in front of me in line at the store was buying a Coke. The cashier warned him, in Spanish, that he was getting C2, not original Coke. He hadn't meant to grab a C2, so she told him to go look for a bottle that was rojita.

Now, rojo is red, and –ita is a diminutive. But I wasn't sure exactly what "little red" would look like. So, when I was buying my stuff, I asked the cashier about it. Some mutually entertaining Spanglish ensued once we both established a minimum level of bilingualism.

"Rojo," she said, "is more fuerte. Rojito is less, uh..." She wasn't coming up with a term to describe the difference, but then the man came back and held up the normal Coke bottle. "It's brighter?" I suggested. She laughed at our communications and agreed that rojito is brighter than rojo.

Then she gave me Rolos free, after I only had two dollars in cash and didn't want to buy it with a credit card because of surcharges. Very awesome and friendly.