Lesson 06: Adonde vamos? Places

Hey! que tal? - Free spanish lessons

Hola! Bienvenidos al sexto episodio de Hey Que tal? Lecciones de español gratuitas. Dado que es semana santa, y en Argentina muchos aprovechan para Tr tomar unas pequeñas vacaciones, hoy vamos a aprender como planear un viaje.
Hi! And welcome to the sixth episode of Hey Que tal? Free Spanish Lessons. Since this is Holy Week, and in Argentina many use this chance to take some little holidays, today we're going to learn how to plan a trip.
On the last episode we learnt how to make plans to go out. Now let's push it further. Let's say we want to make a trip on Holy Week, so we would like to see where can we go. The way to ask this is the following:
Adonde vamos en Semana Santa?
Where do we go on holy week?
There could be many answers to this question. Let's see some possible answers
Vamos a la playa - Let's go to the beach.
Vamos a la montaña - Let's go to the mountain.
Vamos al río - Let's go to the river.
Vamos a las cataratas - Let's go to the falls.
As you can see, we always say "vamos a" and then the place where we want to go. The verb to go in spanish is "ir" and it is irregular. Let's see how to conjugate it.
Yo voy
Tú vas
Él va
Nosotros vamos
Ustedes Van
Ellos van
I didn´t put the vosotros form because it´s totally unused in latin american spanish, we use Ustedes instead.
If we want to travel, we have to take something to get to our destination. Let´s learn the names of the means of transport.
Car is auto
Subway is subte
Plane is avión
Train is tren
Taxi can be either taxi or remis. Remises are a special kind of taxi that has preset fees and usually are used for longer distances.
Regarding the word bus, depending on the trip that a bus makes, we have different words to define it. For the regular city bus, the name is colectivo, or in slang "bondi". The little bus that can be rented for a small group or that make a specific trip is called "combi". And the big bus that usually covers long distances are called "micro" or "ómnibus".
As you can tell, buses are a big deal in Argentina, probably because an argentinian invented the first "colectivo".
Back to planning, now that we know what to take, we need to get the tickets. So let´s say we are at the terminal, in spanish "Terminal" (or maybe on the phone) and we want to buy some tickets. This is the way to do it.
Quisiera dos pasajes para Mar del Sur para el jueves por favor.
I´d like two tickets to Mar del Sur for this thursday please.
They probably have different options to do that trip on the same day, so a probable answer to our question would be.
Tenemos cuatro que salen el jueves. Cual prefiere?
We have four that leave on thursday. Which one do you prefer?
And here is the key part. What we usually want to know is when a plane/bus/etc leaves, and when it arrives. This is the way to ask this.
A qué hora sale el micro? Y a que hora llega allá?
At what time does the bus leave? And when does it gets there?
Once we get the right one, they´ll probably ask us where do we want to seat. That´s done like this.
Ventanilla o pasillo?
which is
Window or aisle?
And our answer, if it's window: Ventanilla, por favor.
And that´s pretty much it to get a ticket. The rest is as buying a drink which we already learnt.
Finally, I´ll do a small example about a trip plan, first in spanish, and then in english, so you can try to do your own with what we learnt today.
Este año vamos a Mar del Sur para Semana Santa. El jueves a la mañana nos tomamos un taxi para ir a la terminal de ómnibus, y de ahi un micro hasta Mar del Sur. Salimos a las 8 de la mañana y llegamos a las 2 de la tarde. Nos quedamos allá cuatro días, hasta el domingo y de ahi volvemos en otro micro. Ese sale a las 5 de la tarde y llega a las 10 de la noche.
This year we´re going to Mar del Sur for Holy Week. We´ll take a cab on thursday morning to get to the bus station, and from there a bus to Mar del Sur. We leave at 8 am and we arrive at 2 pm. We stay there for four days, until sunday and from there we come back in another bus. That one leaves at 5pm and arrives at 10pm.
On the next episode we´ll get more specific about how to go from one place to another, but for now this is enough.
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My name is Pablo Apiolazza and this is Hey Qué tal? Free spanish lessons.
Felices Pascuas, Happy Easter, stay tuned and goodbye!