from Firenze

decaf cafe american.
that is UHMEHRIH-CAN KAWFY

I don’t do this often but sitting next to a table of 7 americans ordering desert in a lovely little spot in florence at 10 odd PM is amusing and i pulled my laptop out.

Whereas the chinese tourist orders in a confused way, the uhmehrihcan orders as though the waiter is both retarded and deaf

why?
I don't know.

Couple of suggestions:

1. sometimes ordering from a menu in a foreign language is difficult. If you don’t like a type of food, learn the word for this in the local language. Unfortunately if english isn’t spoken well at said restaurant, when you loudly and with much hand waving try telling the waiter that if he serves you nuts you’ll die, he may simply think you’re nuts and probably serve you pistachios.

2. Also, unless someone tells you otherwise, or your eating at the new cooking school for veterans of heavy artillery, the waiters don’t have a busted tympani, they speak EYETALYIN. You took the time to buy a ticket, pack and travel to a new place. Why insist that it is the olive garden?

________
A guilty footnote. I only speak english. And while a trained monkey would be more impressive speaking Italian than I, I’d like to think that the waiters don’t feel like circus animals themselves after I order. Then again I utilize a repertoire of six italian words like it was the OED (OID?). Maybe this is worse.

Who knows -- i’m actually looking around right now to see if anyone is writing a blog entry about the foolish american who is writing about americans.....