Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Linguistic Adventures Abound

Another country, another linguistic adventure!

This time during our last night in Egypt we wanted to try Hibiscus tea. According to local legend it means you'll never get cancer, an ancient remedy used by the ancient Egyptians.

My problem was that hibiscus is not hibiscus in arabic, it's something starting with C. With the menu we had this shouldn't have been a problem as it had both English and Arabic printed on it. Only our waiter couldn't read English and I can't read Arabic. That just left us both pointing at random things on the menu, confirming different words in different languages and him confidently walking away to get us something we didn't want.

We even had ourselves convinced for the first 5 minutes that hibiscus tea looked, tasted and smelt exactly the same as coffee.

Sent from my glorious e71 which is most definitely not an iPhone!

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