Hello everyone:
A friend and I recently went to Paris. We had been told that we didn’t need to worry about not knowing more French than “hello,” “goodbye,” “thank you,” “How are you?” and “Do you speak English?” No problem. If you at least try to speak French, they told us, everything would be fine. Except it wasn’t.
We went to dinner at a cute little restaurant, thinking that we would have a lovely meal, followed by a nice walk around the city before returning to our hotel for the evening. Right. Well, the place was very cute, and we had a nice walk afterwards. Two out of three isn’t bad. Unless you’re really hungry and the menu is totally in French and your waitress says she doesn’t know a word of English. Whoopsie. Our bad.
So, I did my usual “hello,” and “How are you?” French sentences, followed by my pathetic attempt at “Do you speak English?” She corrected my “English” to something I didn’t catch. Then she said, “No.”
Okay, we can deal with this. I looked at the menu. As a person who LOVES Italian food, I saw something to the effect of “this is Italian food” on the menu and pointed to that. She repeated whatever the dinner was called, nodding as she realized that was what I wanted. I couldn’t wait for the pasta, spaghetti sauce, and the potential for lasagna (Please note that I was a bit concerned, having ordered a twenty-pound dinner in England and being served two meatballs without even a single strand of spaghetti in the mix. Two meatballs. That was it.) Yeah, well there wasn’t a drop of spaghetti in the overflowing dish of food she brought me a few minutes later.
What did I get? Only the good Lord knows. I recognized lettuce and that was about all. It was dripping with some kind of white sauce, but the pies de resistance (I can’t spell it and apparently Siri can’t either) of the meal was a white lump of something in the middle of the plate. It was covered with scallions (It was nice to recognize something) and looked like something from another planet. I have a limited sense of taste and smell, so I asked my friend to taste it, after I sampled it and didn’t drop over dead. She couldn’t figure out what it was, either.
The final part of the dinner was three strips of mystery meat. At least, I think it was meat. It was striped and vaguely resembled bacon. Uncooked bacon, that is. I ate one piece of it but had no idea what it was, so I turned to the breadbasket. Since my friend is gluten free and the bread was filled with gluten and because I was still hungry after my journey into the French version of Italian food, I ate it all. The bread, that is. Not bad, for thirty Euros. Awful, actually. The ice cream we bought afterwards was delicious. Ten Euros for half a pint of ice cream, but at that point, it was worth it.
Best,
Dr. Sheri