This past March I traveled with my family in Italy. While dining in Venice, we had one of those little funny incidents you have to laugh about later.

We asked our waiter if he spoke any English, using one of the few Italian phrases we knew. He replied that he knew a little. Along with our order, we wanted a glass of cold milk for our child. We always say cold, otherwise, as is typical in many parts of Europe, you will get warm milk.


So, after a very short time, along comes our wine with the glass of milk, along with the sugar cube(apparently also typical, and that's great, not knocking it, just filling you in), but the milk is warm. Our child won't even touch warm milk, unless there is chocolate involved. We thought maybe the waiter had forgotten that we wanted it cold.

So, when our waiter comes back to the table, we ask if we could please have cold milk. He gives us a blank stare for a minute, then nods and smiles as a look of comprehension dawns over his face.......or so we think.

Shortly, he arrives smiling with the new glass of milk, but this glass of milk is even hotter than the last. So we revert to sign language, touching our cold glasses of wine and saying ice, and finally the glass of cold milk arrives. We thank him profusely, and have a lovely meal.

Later on that evening......... We decide that it would be a good idea to learn how to say cold milk, so as to have any easier time, because to the child, cold milk is a serious issue, as serious as good wine is to wine aficionados. After refering to our italian phrasebook, we discover that in Italian the word for cold is fredo, great. And.........the world for hot is CALDO. Duh, no wonder the milk came back hotter, he thought he hadn't warmed it up enough for us.

Not majorly funny, but we have to giggle over it every so often.

In Venice a few years ago, Mrs. Fly was trying to figure out the ingredients in a pasta dish. Between the waiter's limited English and our phrase book, we got most of them , but one stumped us. The waiter consulted another restaurant employee, came back, and said it is "sea vegetable." Interesting.

So the dish comes and the sea vegetable turned out to be clams. Which Mrs. Fly loves. YEA!

Rufus, that reminds me of the time some new friends in Budapest took us to a venerable old restaurant and did all the ordering. Their English was sketchy at best, and when we asked what we were eating, the answer was "the important parts of the pig."

Hmmmmmm, were those the important parts from the diner's point of view or the pig's point of view?

Ah, Rufus, that is <i>exactly</i> what we said! (It turned out to be liver, which was the second worst imaginable scenario.)