![]() ![]() Here’s my story: I walk onto the school playground at pick up time with a bag of nearly perfect pants in hand. It is, but, bloody hell, mate, you are likely to get it all wrong if you don’t speak the language. What do you do with nearly perfect pants? You give them to a friend who can use them. The pants were nearly perfect (which is the first strange thing about this story, as my son can wear the knees out of pants in 30 seconds flat–I should have known at this point that fate was conspiring to trick me in some way). I bought him some new school uniforms that he outgrew after just a wearing or two. My son was young when we lived in Yorkshire young and growing like a weed. Maybe you get the point already, but let me illustrate the problem. Let’s just leave it at that.Īnother word that becomes awkward in England: “pants.” If you spill beer on yourself in the pub, whatever you do, do not loudly proclaim that your pants are dirty. I speak from experience.Īlso, if you are an American traveling in the UK, do not use the word “fanny” to refer to your bottom…it does not. And please do not say it to your elderly neighbor under any circumstance. Turns out Ron Weasley had a serious potty mouth. It’s Ron Weasley’s favorite catch phrase, for Pete’s sake–what’s not charming about that? Well, yeah. “Bloody Hell!” What a quaint British phrase that is. There are approximately 8,992 ways that you travelers might embarrass yourselves (and those around you) in any given moment, but I’ll cover just a few examples. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass.” ― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. Mark Twain knew this, and you will too after only a few short days in country. ![]() You WILL embarrass yourself again and again. When you are abroad, even in a country where you think you speak the same language as the locals, you don’t speak the same language as the locals. (If you aren’t familiar with the speech and the controversy, see the links at the end of this post*) “Ich bin ein Berliner”–does that translate as “I am a Berliner” or “I am a jelly donought”? It almost doesn’t matter whether we’re looking at a dreadful gaffe or a faux faux pas–an urban legend–it makes a point. It was a moment of solidarity…or possibly a moment of hilarity, depending on whom you ask. Kennedy made his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in West Berlin not long after the Soviets put up the wall. It is so very easy, when you are in another country trying to abide by other customs, eat other food, and speak another language, to blunder time and again. It is the right of a traveler to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends.Alternately entitled: One way we foreigners perfect the art of faux pas "Quick, let's run before he judges us! - David Sedarisġ7. ![]() He has a passport," my classmates would whisper. ![]() It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off. It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport'. Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people. Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. I guess that's what you call it when everybody comes back alive. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough. In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveler and not a tourist. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. You can handle just about anything that comes at you out on the road with a believable grin, common sense and whiskey. Modern traveling is not traveling at all it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel. I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe. What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit. People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself. Read some funny, absurd and sarcastic travel quotes from people who are in a love-hate relationship with traveling.ġ. ![]()
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