Posted by paulrivas on: Sun 25th Sep, 2011

As a Santa Barbara man about Goleta, I’m never the first to know what’s going on downtown. When Ablitt’s Spanish rook finally went up on West Haley Street years ago, I walked by it six times before I saw it there, a pint-sized posh parking lot palace. 

Apparently Casa Blanca (two words = White House, one word = city in Morocco) opened at 330 State Street six weeks ago. It’s a Mexican food place in a Jeff Shelton building. They have a regular menu, but they also have a weekend menu (Fridays from 3pm, all day Saturday & Sunday) that they call the Happy Hour menu.

When we got there Friday at 6pm, there was a wait for dinner tables, even though there were a ton of empty tables in the dinner sections. The Happy Hour section was slammed, but they let us in anyway.

We sat there for so long before spotting a server – and so long again before tackling one and tricking her into helping us – that I was beginning to wonder if I wasn’t actually in a misspelled Moroccan Casablanca. These people were taking forever on purpose! How authentic!!!

The Happy Hour food is nothing special, but fair-ish-ly priced. I’ve no idea about the regular menu, since they wouldn’t sell to us from it.

The Happy Hour menu does bear one bad omen for this white Moroccan house: they spelled tacos wrong.

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Tags: bad english, bad spanish, casa blanca, casablanca, bradlee van pelt sighting, how do you spell tacos

Posted by paulrivas on: Tue 13th Sep, 2011

I owe Gabriel Grosvald so big, I invited him to be my houseguest. And I live at my wife's parents' house!

Shortly after I met Gabo in Buenos Aires in 2007, he invited me to perform in the stand-up comedy show he was headlining at El Bululú. For 11 minutes, I made light of everything I'd experienced in my 1.5 years as a half-gringo half-Mexican non-native speaker of Mexican Spanish living in Argentina. People laughed.

The first comment on YouTube said, in Argentine Spanish, "This [perjorative name for a Spaniard] has less talent than an ugly whore's cunt," but I clicked on his channel and saw 50 commenters calling him a prick for insulting people. So either he was trolling, or he's a dreadfully honest guy with phenomenally bad luck such that everytime he clicks on a video it really, really sucks.

Gabo is the best stand-up comedy producer in Argentina now, and he came to town last weekend an invited guest on Real Gauchos, a Rivas Cultural Services radio joint.

By the way, the reason I owe him so big is not because he believed in me artistically as an illegal foreign worker making fun of the host country, but because my stand-up comedy experience is the first thing interviewers want to talk about when I apply for real jobs.

Categories:

Tags: gabo, grosvald, ezequiel campa, malena pichot, el bululú, real gauchos, gallego, poco talento, concha de la lora, stand-up, Argentina stand-up boom