Linguistic Potholes

Kebab houses in Geneva are different to the ones back home. For a start you can order red wine in them, and sit on a terrace with a plate. You can even have a rice based meal... Crazy. They also differ in the sense that on the whole you are expected to speak French: beware. More dangers lurk in this language than in the meat you are eating there. Scary.

There is one truly consistent thing about kebaberies though: the people that run them. Always the same type of man that is incredibly flirty and in the really irritating sense, such that he likes to tease and patronise women (I do not like this technique, pas du tout). They find this a lot easier to do when one does not speak very good French and the other day, having gone for a pint by the lake (do not get me started on how beautiful that is) with a friend, kebabs seemed the natural progression. In this, Mr Donor got the perfect opportunity to perform the standard unsuccessful mating ritual and at the same time publicly humiliate me.

Pronunciation is key in French and it is not always easy to perfect. If I were to give you one piece of advice it is this: never say "Thank-you very much" to a sleazy Turkish man.

There are a few words that you run the risk of being gravely misinterpreted with. Beaucoup (a lot) is one such. When I responded with the natural "Merci beaucoup" (thanks a lot/very much) I had momentarily forgotten this and boy is that one scenario where you shouldn't be flippant. When he asked me "Quoi?" I was well aware that I should not repeat myself but perhaps I would have been better off ignorant, since the damage had been done and I understood enough to know that the entire shop had just heard me say "Thank-you nice arse".

However, since I had also made the second worst mistake in a kebab shop (to not say "sans piquant" in time) it turned out that having inadvertently seduced my server I could get whatever I wanted (as long as what I wanted was a fresh kebab bun without hot sauce). So I suppose I learnt that sexual impropriety does pay off. Hmmmm. Ponder that one...