Mora and Monica in Madrid

My exchange friend Mallory and I after 3 months in Spain have become a bit of caffeine addicts and when we discovered there was a Starbucks a street from my house we quickly became regulars.

There was one problem though, the baristas couldn't understand us when we said our very American sounding names. We'd wait for 10 minutes, wondering where our Moca blancos were, only to discover they'd been sitting out the entire time with the names Marci and Mimi written on them...How they got Marci from Madison and Mimi from Mallory is, well, interesting to say the least especially considering their not even Spanish names.

But since Mallory and I tend to like our coffee hot, we decided spanish names might be something to look into.

We did a couple test runs, Mercedes and Margarita. Yes, the baristas could understand these names, and we got our hot coffees, but we also got some pretty funny looks. Looks along the lines of "not a chance in hell is your name Mercedes." Their complete lack of faith in Mallory's name being Margartia and mine Mercedes was a bit embarrassing. So we decided what we really needed were Spanish names that are also popular in the U.S. so that way the people at Starbucks would understand us, but they'd also believe these were our names.

The end result,
Monica (Mallory) and Mora (me)