My Life is a Telenovela

I love telenovelas (soap operas in Spanish) and I'm going to blog about them. I started watching them at a young age with my parents (who are from Mexico) and was immediatly captivated.

Spanish was my first language as a baby, but when my brother and I entered school, my parents started to speak to us only in English, fearing we would have trouble in school if they continued to speak to us in Spanish. So little by little, I forgot most of my Spanish.

I was about 11 when I started to sit and watch a full episode of a telenovela. It was called Alondra. At first I didn't understand most of the words. But the overall production was so well done, that anyone from anywhere could understand whats going on. Before I knew it, I started to enjoy and understand more and more, and I was hooked.

Telenovelas are stories about love, revenge, humility, cheating, money, pain, hope, triumph of good over evil, karma, struggle, freedoom, chance, and fate. And most importantley: LOVE! It sounds cheesy, and it is. They can even sometimes be predictable. But there is the difference between a good one and a bad one.

What makes them so captivating is that they are usually one hour episodes, monday to friday, for anywhere from 3 months to a year. So the story has a begining, middle, end, and then a new one begins all over again.

The whole world has caught on to this format and are now hundreds of telenovelas are produced all over in many different countries. It's established style involves such crazy and over-the-top storylines and characters that it is hard not to watch.

Welcome to my Blog!

I'm going to write about Telenovelas. For now, I'm just going to write generally, not focusing on one particular telenovela, but just my favorites, and what I like about telenovelas. I've done some research, and found a few good sites. Although there are not many good or useful sites in general, there are many dedicated to one particular telenovela.

1. This one is called The Gardener's Daughter, and it recaps the episodes of the telenovela of the same title. What I like about this site is that it is also about general telenovela news, and also other ones. And best of all, it is in english, talking about telenovelas in spanish! The only thing I don't like about it is that there are possibly too many ads.

2. Telenovelas, is actually a long recap of the whole telenovela Cuando Seas Mia (When You're Mine). It looks like this person sat down and wrote a recap of each episode and then posted it all in one day. The site looks and reads good, but there is not much else to it.

3. TV Brasil is a really good site, becasue it covers Brazilian telenovelas, which are often dubbed into Spanish and crazy popular througout Latin America, as well as the world. This site is for all the Spanish speaking fans of Brazilian telenovelas.