Prickly pear is what I believe this strange fruit is called in English, and rightly so. In Spain we call it higo chumbo (I know it sounds like Tarzan is talking, but it's not). It’s just a funny name, though it stops being funny when you actually have to deal with these things.

You might wonder what chumbo means.

Well… it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a silly word — like most Spanish words that start with "ch".

Take chorizo, for example. That word alone is worth a whole pragmatic study. It’s just so Spanish. We put it in many winter dishes, but after gobbling down a French-bread chorizo sandwich, you feel like a superhero.

On the other hand, if someone calls you a chorizo, they’re definitely not trying to make friends with you. It means you’ve been caught red-handed “borrowing” something from a jewelry store, a supermarket, or any other place where nothing actually belongs to you. Then there are the scatological and sexual meanings of chorizo, but I’ll leave those to your imagination.

As I was saying three paragraphs ago, collecting prickly pears is tricky. I know from experience. The first time I picked one straight from a cactus… nothing happened in the first second, but a minute later, I was screaming in excruciating pain. I had hundreds of tiny pricks stuck in my hands — pun totally intended.

That's why I like chorizo so much — no cactus, no pricks and all the superhero feeling in just one normal bread sandwich. So "Long live chorizo!"— or maybe "Long live long chorizo!" would be more precise… pun fully intended.

You can listen to it here. Now It's turned into a song 😂