Your medio ambiente is your environment. This refers to your cultural, social or natural environment.

I saw desincrustante in the store the other day on a bottle of facial cleanser. I thought it was pretty gross sounding, de-cruster. It is actually not that bad, desincrustante just means an exfoliant.

A toalla is a towel, what you would use to dry off. Pronounced twai-ya, to me is it hard to recognize at first when I see it written.

Desechables are disposables. Items you would use once then discard, such as paper or plastic plates, cups and bowls or syringes or diapers.

Today we went to the playa, the beach, where there was arena. On the beach we wore our playeras, short sleeve shirts or t-shirts.

We had a pipe break in the street in front of our house recently. While trying to figure out who to call  we found the phrase fuga de agua. Literally it means a flight of water but is used to refer to water escaping accidently.

These two words, harina and arena, give me fits. Although they look very different, their pronunciation is very close, the difference of an i and an e.

Harina is flour and arena is sand. I don’t know how many times, no matter how hard I try, I have ordered sand tortillas.