In France, your breakfast waiter invariably will leave you hankering for more. You might just leave the table hungry. And why is that so?<\/p>\n
Glad you asked. The custom is supposed to be that the omelet you order at a French cafe will contain only one egg, not two, or even three, as is common in some American restaurants.<\/p>\n
The French serve one-egg omelets because in France, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153one egg is an \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcoeuf.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Now does that sound enough like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153enough\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to explain why diners go hungry?<\/p>\n
Back from a 17-day tour with family to the Czech Republic and Austria, I have tales to tell \u00e2\u20ac\u201d mostly miscommunications \u00e2\u20ac\u201d about experiences in both places. When we eight Trujillo pilgrims chose these sites, I was pleased because Austrians generally speak German, a language I studied back in the olden days, and a great many tourists, I discovered, use French, the language I am studying under the ever-so-patient retired teacher, Lupita Gonzales.<\/p>\n
What happens when one flirts with two foreign languages is confusion between the two; so I was using a noun in the wrong language to get my point across.<\/p>\n
Now let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s discuss culinary matters:<\/p>\n
The first day at the Austrian bed-and-breakfast I ordered fried eggs, received an acknowledging smile from the waitress, and waited a few minutes, whereupon she brought an egg whose shell needed to be cracked with the edge of a knife and scooped out.<\/p>\n
Well call me \u00e2\u20ac\u0153picky.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I offered that egg to my Danish daughter-in-law, Lisbeth, who ate it \u00e2\u20ac\u201d with relish \u00c2\u00ad\u00e2\u20ac\u201d well, maybe not with relish, but with pleasure. Five minutes later, an identical egg-atop-a funny looking cup appeared. I thanked the server but explained, in the best German I could muster, that she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d already brought me the egg.<\/p>\n
Her reply was that I had actually ordered two eggs, and she was cooking them one at a time. Thanks to my miscommunication, Lisbeth ate well that morning. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never been accustomed to ordering serially: To me, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153two eggs over well\u00e2\u20ac\u009d means they arrive at the same time on the same plate.<\/p>\n
One other family member, Heather, had ordered her two eggs scrambled, and they arrived together. Through the week, I ordered and received scrambled eggs, but that was after the day in which my order of two over-well eggs arrived in installments.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u201a\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u201a\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
In previous columns, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve written about wishing to dazzle French and German speakers with my own contributions to the language. The \u00e2\u20ac\u0153interference\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to which I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve alluded isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t so much trying to force in a word in English, but in the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153other\u00e2\u20ac\u009d language. I completely forgot the German word for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153egg\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in Austria, so I threw in the French word. It worked.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 \u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u201a\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Little had prepared any of us for the visual treat we experienced exploring, on separate days, a salt mine and an ice cave. We signed up for the eight-hour tours but didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t realize that the caves were dimly lit, slippery, icy and uphill.<\/p>\n
Our tour guide explained that the village of Hallstatt, where we stayed a week, supplies 30,000 tons of salt to Austria each year, with a skeleton crew of about one-eighth that of the mine when it was fully operational in the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc40s.<\/p>\n
The tour is for the hearty, not necessarily recommended for people in their mid-70s, laden with cameras and sweaters to cope with the 40s temperatures inside the cave.<\/p>\n
A long tram ride took us close to the top of the peaks, where suddenly, we were looking down the valley; the climate changes, as does the vegetation. The younger members of our crew walked to a site called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Five Fingers,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which features projections that jut out into space.<\/p>\n
The \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fingers\u00e2\u20ac\u009d were built some years ago, supposedly to challenge visitors who desired stepping onto lookouts that lacked any substantial support from below.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u201a\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00e2\u20ac\u201a\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2<\/p>\n
Cornelius Ryan wrote \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Longest Day,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a book that later became a movie in the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc60s, about D-Day operations during the war.<\/p>\n
Wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the first day of summer also qualify as the longest day? I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get the movie out of my mind as we made our way back to the U.S., skipping across eight time zones.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Jet lag\u00e2\u20ac\u009d generally affects me as we travel east. On our first trip overseas, we arrived in Denmark at around 9 a.m. But that would really have been 1 a.m. our time, when we prepare for bed.<\/p>\n
But our son Stan was eager to show us Copenhagen sights as soon as we arrived, and all we could think about was a comfortable bed.<\/p>\n
For me, jet lag isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a factor on our trip home. We left the Prague Holiday Inn at 4:30 Sunday morning, to catch our 7 a.m. flight to London. Although our airtime was almost two hours, we appeared to have made the trip in one hour, as we also gained an hour.<\/p>\n
And leaving London close to 9 a.m., we gained another six hours on the trip\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s leg to Dallas-Fort Worth. And we gained still another hour as we reached New Mexico.<\/p>\n
Extended flights, as we skip through multiple time zones, indeed cause jet lag for some. Our \u00e2\u20ac\u0153longest day\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was closer to 30 hours, as we began our day just as the sun rose in Prague, and touched down in Albuquerque long before sundown \u00e2\u20ac\u201d all on a Sunday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In France, your breakfast waiter invariably will leave you hankering for more. You might just leave the table hungry. And why is that so? Glad you asked. The custom is supposed to be that the omelet you order at a French cafe will contain only one egg, not two, or even three, as is common […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1240"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1241,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions\/1241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}