Hover a line for its translation; hover a word for its meaning. Tap 🔊 to hear it.
Generate a brand-new dialog on any topic, using this lesson's 0 vocab words — plus any words you add below.
Sign in to generate dialogues. It needs a pass — the first ten lessons of every course are free either way.
Tipping lightly, terrace surcharges, and the queue that is not a line
Most of what a visitor gets wrong in Spain is small and financial, and Lucía's three warnings cover the ones that actually recur. Tipping first, because it is the one people most often get wrong in the generous direction. Spain is a low-tipping country. Service staff are on a salary rather than on tips, there is no percentage expectation, and rounding up or leaving the coins is entirely sufficient — a euro or two on a meal for two, nothing at all on a coffee or a beer. Leaving twenty per cent is not offensive but it is conspicuous, and it marks you out as foreign more reliably than your accent does. In a taxi, round up. At a bar, leave the change. Terrace pricing is the surcharge that surprises people. The same drink has up to three prices in the same establishment — cheapest standing at the barra, more at a mesa inside, most on the terraza outside — and this is legal, normal, and required to be posted somewhere. It is not a scam, and asking before you sit is reasonable. Where you should be careful is a terrace on a famous square with no prices displayed at all, which is what Lucía's carteles sin precio means: you are entitled to see a price list, and a place that does not show one has decided something about its customers. Haggling does not happen. In shops, markets and taxis the price is the price, and attempting to negotiate reads as either confused or insulting. The exceptions are genuine flea markets, second-hand goods and some tourist stalls — and even there it is mild. This differs sharply from what visitors sometimes expect of southern Europe, and getting it wrong in an ordinary shop is embarrassing rather than costly. Finally the queue, which is worth understanding because it looks like chaos and is not. In a pharmacy, a bakery or a market stall people do not form a line; they arrive, establish their place by asking ¿quién es el último? or ¿quién va último?, and then wait wherever is comfortable. The order is held collectively and it is respected exactly. A foreigner who stands in what looks like the right spot without asking will either be skipped or be thought to have pushed in — which is what Lucía means by no te cueles. Ask the question and the system works perfectly.