Served with the tit: and I'm back...briefly

So, I lied when I said I'd be back in June.

July didn't feel right either.

It's the end of August, the schizoid Boston summer is drawing its last gasps, and I'm finally, FINALLY getting around to updating this public log of lettered masturbation.

If there was anyone out there actually reading, my apologies.

I have a few posts pending before I launch into a reformulated version of Epicurean Piggy. (Still working on what that will be, since I'm chained to a desk job in Cambridge for at least the next year.) We should pick off where I left off. Post-vaccinations and post-France, but before my reentry to grown up working life. The 3-week interval that (mercifully) padded my departure from Saint-Etienne and the return to the 9-5 grind.

My journey to the Andes, to the land of Inka Kola, salt flats, and coca leaves. An indirect journey, since to get to just about anywhere in South America, travelers typically fly through one of three "portals": LAX, Houston, or MIA.

Mi-yami International Aeroport. The first airport I ever flew from. Probably, the airport I know the best in the world. I've flown out of MIA as a baby shit-machine, a pajama-clad toddler, an awkward unibrowed pre-teen, and an awkward-er teenager (apparently, there's only so much separating your eyebrows can do to up your cool quotient). In my twenties, I've probably flown in/out/and through MIA close to thirty times.

So I know it well.

And yet, there's a particular phenomenon that still catches me off guard each time I step off a plane and walk past the pink flamingos, mounted tropical fish, and palm trees that class up the joint. I head to the nearest Starbucks for a caffeine fix, I stand in line, and I observe this exchange.

Starbucks employee: What would you like?
Customer: Deme un café y un blueberry muffin, please.
Starbucks employee: Señora, there's no más blueberry muffins. Le puedo offer uno de apple cinnamon.
Customer: No, entonces un bagel con cream cheese, por favor.
Starbucks: Son cuatro dollars and siete cents.

Spanglish, not English or Spanish, is the ruling language in this town. Miamians occupy a unique linguistic space where even white people sound Latin and Hispanics forget that "parquear" is not, in fact, the Spanish equivalent of "park."

If I told you my house was ubicated by the river, would you know what I was talking about?

This is one of the big drawbacks to being fully billingual: you become too comfortable slipping in and out of multiple languages, and sooner or later they begin to fuse together in your brain.

Here is another example: as a child, I often made the mistake of telling my cousins I was embarazada. What I hoped to communicate to them was that I was embarrassed. What they heard was that I was pregnant. The two are what the French call faux amis - false friends (or cognates) in English.

The latter is my favorite type of billingual misfire. False, and often inappropriate, friends. And as a Miamian through and through, I thought I'd heard the best of the best.

Wrong.


The frowning gentleman you see above is my friend Sergey, a Russian, raised part in the Old Country and part in Amerika. You know how there are people who are bitten by the travel bug? Sergey was bitten by the travel python. He quit his job two years ago to travel across Asia and the Middle East. He returned to the U.S., deferred his entrance to business school, and kept on traveling; this time around South America. I met up with Sergey in Lima, the first leg of my Andean adventure. Fresh from Colombia and Ecuador, Sergey came to me a newly minted Spanglophile, wearing stories of linguistic missteps like badges of honor.

Sergey is (un)luckier than most: he speaks English and Russian like a native, French like a respectable Russian, and now, Spanish. This means that his misfires run the risk of being more powerful than most folks (picture tiny armies of English, Russian, French, and Spanish neurons chasing each other all around the left side of his brain). Our first day together, he told me the following story.

Sergey is in the Medellin sky tram, in Colombia. He's packed tightly in the car with a handful of other internationals; the rest of the tram riders are locals. Sergey is deep in a discussion about Colombian fare: specifically, seafood. It appears there is a local fish that is considered a delicacy. Sergey wants to know more. He wants to ask how the fish is served. If it is served whole. With the head.

Sergey thinks he remembers the word for "head" in Spanish. He "makes memory" (hacer memoria, sorry, I couldn't resist). He scans his mind. There's the word! It travels from his brain to his mouth, and he asks:

"Se sirve con la teta?"

The tram explodes with laughter. Sergey is confused. For a moment. And then, that pale creamy skin of his turns dark crimson.

The thing is, Sergey happened on the French word for head. La tête. In Spanish, it is la cabeza. But to say teta in Spanish, is to give the question an entirely different meaning.

"Is it served with the tit?"