June 22, 2008
Funny Story of Mixed Communication.
written by Nicole Allegar on June 22, 2008 at 04:43PM in Traveling
Spencer and I sat down this afternoon to have some lunch with our new friend, Jasper, from Holland. We were talking about making empanadas for dinner (in English), and Jasper said he liked “pollo and mice” in the empanadas. Both Spencer and I were shocked that people ate mice in Argentina.We asked him if they were popular in Holland as well. He said they have lots of mice fields and asked us if we had any in the States. Spencer and I told him we had fields that had mice in them, but eating mice to Americans was like eating cats in Holland… it’s unheard of. And we would never dream of raising mice in fields just for eating purposes.
He looked at us like we were crazy. Then Spencer started singing “little bunny foo foo, hoping through the forrest, scooping up the field mice, and bopping them on the heads”. The whole time, Jasper was just looking at us without a clue as to what we were talking about.
We had a few mice tangents, and many mouse noises and actions were made, including the classic “squeek, squeek” and little mouse paws from Spencer.
Finally, Spencer asked if they bought the mouse whole before they cooked it. Jasper starting laughing and said “oh no… not mice, maiz, like corn” (maiz is the Spanish word for corn). We all got a pretty big laugh out of it for a couple minutes. I guess that is what happens when you have multiple languages floating around. If you want to get the full impression of how he felt during the conversation, re-read the above paragraphs, substituting corn in every time you see mice. It’s pretty hilarious.
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