Lost in the Spanish language again

José was 35 years old and desperately in love with me. I was 23 and had no particular interest in him. But he had a car and I wanted to get to know the countryside. That was why I agreed to a day trip to the coast with him. And that was how I ended up standing on to of a cliff posing like a model. José had the idea of taking photographs of me with the sea in the background. Now don’t get any naughty ideas in your head – it as 3 pm, we were on a public road and fully dressed.

So, I was standing there on the cliffs, trying to pose the way the models in those TV-casting shows do. I told José, who was playing the photographer, that he should tell me how to pose.
He told me in Spanish: “Mira el parajito” (Look at the little bird). I thought, he was talking about the birds that were flying over the cliffs. So I looked up towards the sky, trying to have a dreamy look on my face longing for the ocean.
“No, no, no,” José told me, “mira el parajito.”
I kept following the sea gulls with my eyes.
“No,” José shouted at me, “You don’t understand me. Look at me.”
I turned towards him and had a strange look on my face. He took a picture and he didn’t care about my strange look; he was in love and, therefore, he thought, the picture was beautiful. I didn’t agree but I had no patience to pose any longer.

The next day, I had coffee with Pablo and Nuria, two other Spanish friends. They asked me how my ‘date’ with José had been. So, I used the opportunity to ask, what parajito means, other than little bird.
“Did he really tell you that?” Nuria asked me
“Yes, why?” I looked at her in a puzzled way.
“Well, in colloquial language, parajito means penis.”
“What? What did he want to tell me with that?”
“Maybe you don’t want to know.” Nuria suggested, “You don’t want to date that guy again.”

“But maybe, he meant something else,” Pablo told me later on.
“What’s that?”
“In Spanish, if you want to take a picture of children and if you want them to look into the camera, you tell them: Mira el parajito, and by that you mean the flash.”
“So, José was talking to me as if I was a child?”
“Probably, but you don’t want to date a guy, who talks to you as if you were a child.”