Se me ponchó una llanta

If you don't know, a llanta is a tire.   And as we all know, tires often go flat.  I had a flat two weeks in a row, both at almost midnight.  Yeah, it sucked.  But I digress.

In Mexico, when you want to talk about getting a flat tire, the verb you're likely to hear is poncharse.    So if you want to say you got a flat tire, that's where our phrase comes in:

Se me ponchó una llanta
I got a flat tire

If you want to talk about other people who got flat tires, you can say:

Se te ponchó una llanta
You got a flat tire

Se le ponchó una llanta
He/She got a flat tire

Se nos ponchó una llanta
We got a flat tire

Se les ponchó una llanta
They got a flat tire

A flat tire, the tire itself that is, is called a ponchada.  And the plural version is ponchadas.  You may also hear the word ponchadura.

If you want your tire fixed, you  might want to go to a "taller para reperar llantas" - a workshop where they repair tires.   These places go by several names:

"ponchaduría", "desponchaduría", "desponchadora", "vulcanizadora"  or "vulka".

These workshops aren't your Sears or Wal-Mart tire centers, but instead might look something like this:

In fact, if you take a drive through a Mexican neighborhood, you may see a desponchadora that hopefully isn't as quite as untidy as the one in our photo. 

Like always, in the Spanish language there's more than one way to skin a cat.  Especially if you're talking about flat tires.  Other words to take a look at are pinchar, gomas, and desinfladas to name a few.  Wordreference.com is a great place to look if you're interested in alternatives.

Anyway, that's it for today.  Be careful not to ponchar any llantas in the near future!