SPUD LEGS & EXPLODING DUCKS

Now, even if you’ve never been farther away from home than around the block, let alone to a foreign country, you’ll still be aware that people do things differently out there. And if you have actually been to another country - excluding Canada, of course, which might as well be in America - you’ll know that things can get very strange. Maybe we should re-include Canada; Canadians can be very odd sometimes. Eh?

For example, I am an American living in Portugal, a country very different from ours, yet sometimes I buy my bread from the Arizona Bakery - which is actually a truck parked outside a huge palace. How about that one for weird, then?
One thing you will discover immediately in a foreign country is that most of the inhabitants speak little or no English. This is a great handicap for them in struggling to communicate with you. But be patient because they will catch on eventually, and do try not to show your amusement when they say something silly. And rest assured they will.

The farther away you go from home, the stranger things can get. I’m informed that in China they love eating fish-lips. I suppose with all those billions of people competing to be fed you have to eat what’s put in front of you and pretend you like it. Maybe to a Chinese kid a bowl of fish lips look just like Cheerios.

So the trick to successful foreign travel is to expect the unexpected and not be put off by it. That doesn’t mean you have to eat fish-lips if there’s a perfectly good McDonald’s within a hundred miles.

I’ve travelled extensively all over the world and I’m always learning something new. Yesterday I found out that Portuguese potatoes have legs. Scrawny vestigial legs, but legs nonetheless. This came as a surprise, but as a veteran traveler it was not a shock and I took the information in my globe-trotting stride. The only question I had was, what happens to all the legs when the potatoes are turned into french fries? Perhaps the French like them. They’ll eat any damn thing and say it tastes good, even if it’s really horrible. They do this primarily to annoy Americans and have been at this nonsense ever since we defeated them in the Vietnam War and banned those silly-looking Citroen cars from our highways.

I did venture into the french-fry plant, a place called Ti Ti. In Portuguese it’s pronounced Tee Tee, but any ubiquitous little boy who speaks English knows, shall we say, a more titillating pronunciation. I wanted to learn more about the spud-legs, but unfortunately no one there was educated enough to explain the facts in simple English. A few of them laughed in reply to my question, but that’s what a foreigner will do when faced with his linguistic failings.

This brings me naturally to my new steam-iron. It’s called the IRON STAR and looks very smart, all swoopy blue racing stripes on gleaming white plastic. It’s not an expensive one, in fact it was the cheapest iron I could find at 9 euros and 99 bits of a euro - about $150. I wonder if a European financial expert is called a eurologist?
It looked simple enough to operate and even though I’m a man I do have some prior experience with irons. But then I foolishly did what no man should ever do - I read the instruction manual. Or at least I tried to. The Iron Star manual is written in no less than eleven different languages for the European Union countries. Can you imagine such a thing for something as basic as an iron?

We get a bit bent out of shape in the US of A when an automatic telephone answering system asks us to press uno for Spanish, or two for English. What if we had to press eleven for English? That could be the end of our language and American way of life, folks, because there is no eleven on a telephone!

The languages are: German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Netherlandish, Polish, Hebrew, Hungarian and Greek. With my extensive travel experience, I of course read most of the instructions in the original languages and was struck by their inaccuracy. Each seemed to get farther and farther away from the first one, which should by logic and seniority have been English, anyway, not German.
I checked the maker’s address to discover it was not made in China, but at 1322 Himmelsburger Strasse in Germany. That explained the language order and also such strange phrases as: “You’d better put the water in the right way,” or, “it is quite normal for stinks to come when iron is first using hot.” Easy for you to say, mein Herr Fritz, and the start of all the problems.

After that tragic beginning, things went haywire and I’m sure each translator did his work then handed his version onto the next man. It must have been a bit like that kid’s game where you all sit in a circle and whisper a message to each other. What comes out at the end bears no relationship to what went in at the beginning. Thus it was with the Iron Star manual. So, an instruction in German that reads, “WARNUNG: Auf keinen Fall die Bugelsohle beruhnen, solange sie noch nicht abgekuhit ist! I would translate quite easily as, “NOTE: Turning iron upside down to press armpits while wearing garment is not advised.” Simple, really and quite sensible. But by the time we got to the Greek this straightforward instruction now read, ““Do not look at that duck funny because it will explode.”“ Although my Greek is a bit rusty I know enough to translate that line as, “Do not look at the duck funny or it will explode.”

There you are then, the perils of multi-culturalism. The European Union might be a good enough idea on paper, but in reality it’s a place where in Germany some folk try to iron their armpits and have to be warned not to, while in Greece one wrong look and a duck blows up in your face. I blame the Germans, over here they start most things that cause trouble.

Give me, press uno for Spanish, por favor any day. God bless America.