Friday, May 11, 2018

Safari park

The video is about a French family imagining a picnic inside a safari park is a good idea.

But interesting as that is how much English swearing sounds natural tucked into foreign languages. That means our swears are just that excellent. That's cultural appropriation right there. I love it. You can swear anywhere and be understood.


<anecdote alert>
In Puerto Vallarta my friends and I were standing outside in the sun waiting for a taxi at our small hotel. We had luggage. The cab's trunk was loaded with coconuts. My friends waited as the driver unloaded the coconuts. I told my friends we can help the driver unload them to speed things up. They weren't thinking, they didn't follow what he was doing, and they lined up the coconuts along the sidewalk instead of placing them inside the open air first floor office. The hotel owner and the cab driver were friends. He'd come back for the coconuts. The cabbie said in Spanish, "These pussies cannot even put the coconuts in the office." Pussies = panochas. He imagined none of us spoke Spanish. What I heard was blah blah blah panochas blah blah blah and I burst out laughing at the sound of a familiar swear word. He sounded exactly like my punk friends in Denver who taught me. So that word really works! That's all that I understood. The driver looked at me dead on. Now quite worried, assuming I understood the whole thing, then meekly resumed stacking coconuts, self-chided for being so rude and so presumptuous in imagining no American would know what he's saying. I didn't know. I only knew that one word. Then inside the car I realized he was talking about us! He kept looking at me in the mirror, checking on my facial expression. I could tell he was still worried. He really f'd up. My friends were disinclined to tip the guy because of those coconuts and me making them work. They didn't know about him calling us pussies. The driver was worried I would tell them. The trip was short, the cost nearly nothing, we had fun, something unusual, a unique cultural thing there, so I tipped triple the cost of the ride to convey no hard feelings and American panochas really aren't so bad after all.
</anecdote alert>

3 comments:

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

Death in Yellowstone

MamaM said...

Artificially preserved lunch meat--Without the car, they'd have been the picnic.

The Dude said...

French food is not usually fast food.