Telenovela on Public TV!

I'm on vacation today, but I didn't sleep in. So I found out there's a telenovela of sorts running on our public TV station at eight in the morning. It's not a real telenovela, of course; just one designed to teach Spanish. (With the exciting name Introduction to Spanish.) But it's a pretty entertaining show, all the same. I wish I'd seen it back in 1992, when it first aired.

This show was a lot more hardcore than previous language learning ones I've seen. Today they had a mine disaster! Also, a bunch of the kids got sick, and the pater familias was in the hospital. (The show's theme was words for being sick and going to the hospital. Yeah, buddy, they did that.)

The big shock is that there's a main character who's a priest! (Not a shock on a telenovela, but a shock on PBS.) Also, they did a little explanatory feature on Our Lady of Guadalupe, with file footage. (There was a woman walking up to the basilica on her knees; and her husband, a blue-collar guy, was carefully bending down to put little pieces of cloth down in front of her and picking them up from behind her, so she wouldn't hurt her knees or her outfit too much. It was very sweet.)