General/ Travel

Talking Veggie

by Sue Bozeman (www.vegetarian-fun.com)

Oklahoma cavers were asked to present a slide show and lecture at a Speleological Karst Conference in Turkey in 2000. Speleology is the study of caves.

The majority of caves that our caving group, the Central Oklahoma Grotto (http://okcavers.netfirms.com) explores and surveys is in gypsum karst in the western half of Oklahoma. It is hardly the mega-cave capital of the United States, so we were pleasantly surprised to be invited.

After the Conference, we flew to Vienna to pick up our rental car at the airport and join a friend, Anne, who had flown over by herself to Frankfurt, Germany, and taken the train to Vienna. Anne had not wished to be included in the Convention, so she agreed to travel solo in a foreign land, knowing nothing but English! Her escapades just doing that are hilarious, but she did meet us at the pre-reserved hotel.

We had three weeks to play in the wondrous Old World countries we’d only read about or seen previously on TV. The scenery and architecture was everything we’d hoped for, and more. The truly interesting experiences that we’d not planned on revolved around ordering vegetarian meals for Anne! She had memorized a couple food-ordering phrases in the major languages of Europe. That was fine as far as it went, but as those of you for whom a second language is book-learned, you know that when it is your turn to speak, the brain goes blank and the tongue twists.

Our route went through Austria, with a side trip to the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Andorra and Italy. The languages we ‘spoke’ were English, a smattering of Czech and some German. It was a hoot trying to find cognates (words that are basically the same in two languages, like “O.K.” and “auto”) in those languages for non-meat dishes in a very meat-oriented part of the world!

Anne, an actress in her early life, got very good at sign language and began every restaurant or pub inquiry with: “Vegetarian”, pointing at herself and smiling, enchantingly. She would point at a selection on the menu that was a recognizable meat dish and shake her head, saying, “No!”. Then she would point at something that we all had agreed was most probably a salad dish, smile and say, “Vegetarien?”  The change in spelling is intended to mimic the French pronunciation and hopefully would be comprehended more readily than English.

Who knows what these restaurateurs thought of us goofy Amies. They could tell when we walked in that we were American — our clothes are different, our carriage the same–it all says “American tourist”. And yet, nearly everyone came to help us. They struggled with our language; we struggled with dictionaries in their language; we all pointed to various other customers’ plates, with great laughter and shaking of heads either indicating “Yes!” or an emphatic “NO!”

Nowadays, we’d probably have some sort of phone with apps for translating our words into every European language that we encountered. Phones that could ‘talk’ for us would be in each of our hands. It would be wonderful to have access to HappyCow.net on an iPhone, too!  However, if your language skills are poor and your batteries die, don’t forget that “vegetarian” or some derivation of it is an almost international word!

Needless to say, Anne didn’t starve, but each meal was an adventure.

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