Travel stories

Have you ever eaten cat food and liked it? Most people like traveling and being in touch with new cultures and people with different backgrounds. Sometimes, we don’t know how things work in the new culture. That’s why we travel: to see and understand the country visited. But how many times has something embarrassing happened to us because we didn’t know what to do or how to behave? I decided to ask some people to share their embarrassing experiences about traveling.

Maddy Frech: A couple of years ago, I traveled to Spain with my family. On the evening of our first full day there, we went to a very nice restaurant. As expected, the entire menu was in Spanish. Proud of my performance in my Spanish classes and wanting to show my family my “Spanish-speaking abilities,” I offered to order the meals of everyone at the table. However, after our entrees finally arrived and we finished our meal, we learned that I had actually ordered WOLF for everyone, which was not my intention.

James Welt: Well, the story is not about me, but my dad once told me that when one of his friends was in a Spanish speaking country, he was trying to ask his taxi driver a question in Spanish, but he accidentally asked “do you like me?” He had just taken a college Spanish class and he and his friend were both kind of competitive about who knew more Spanish. His friend made fun of him for the rest of the trip.

Yuchen Yang: I have one about my mom. When she first went to Hungary without knowing any Hungarian, she found a kind of cheap canned food that she thought tasted good. After years of living in Hungary, when she saw that canned food again, she found out that it was cat food.

Matilda Mottola: I really love traveling, and every time I have the opportunity to do it, I organize something at the last minute, with friends or without. For that reason, I have many stories about traveling and too many embarrassing ones. Last year, I did an exchange year in Dublin, and I was so excited to learn about a new culture. But no one told me how different the accent and pronunciation were; at first it was incomprehensible! I remember the first day of school, my host mom was preparing a sandwich with meat, and she asked me “do you want butter?” But she overpronunced the letter “u” and I could clearly hear the double “t” so I didn’t understand the word, and to avoid being rude I said “sure, why not?” Once I was at school and I opened my sandwich, I discovered what she meant by “butter.” Actually, it didn’t fit so well with the type of meat she used, but after that day, she always put butter in my sandwich.

Diane Guido: I was in Rome traveling with a friend. He had heard me ask for the bill a number of times at restaurants by saying "il conto." He decided he wanted to try, but said, "il canto." The waiter smiled and happily started singing. I was laughing so hard I was crying. My friend had no idea what was going on :)

Matt Burnett: My daughter's friend was studying abroad in Mexico, and she was still fairly new to Spanish. One day she saw her Mexican friend, opened up her arms, and said enthusiastically, "Dame un abrigo!" She wanted to say "Give me a hug!", but instead said "Give me a coat!"

In these examples, you can see how a foreign language can complicate things in a foreign country. The funny thing is that when you talk, you might believe that you’ve said something well, while once you see the reaction of your interlocutor, you begin to have doubts about what you asked or said. But it’s not a negative thing; instead, I think it is funny, and so you can laugh about it with your friends in that moment and even in the future. Also, for sure, in the future we will remember how to say that particular word that we said wrong first.