Coffee on the Breakfast Pizza (Patreon)

Incidentally, Tom Waits is welcome to use the title of this post for his next album. I love traveling, but it often makes me feel dumb, in both a figurative and litteral sense because I do not speak the language. When I went to Brazil, I was immediatly engulfed in a haze of confusion because my only language training was high school spanish. High school spanish rarely does one any favors but in Brazil it is a downright liability. Portugese sounds a lot like spanish, and in some ways it's similar but in many ways it's not. So I spent a whole week misgendering people, places and things, and had an inordinately difficult time trying to figure out how to mime the phrase "bus station." I now speak even less spanish than when I went because it's mixed up in my head with portuguese. Still, it's the first foregin language I learned and the first one my brain falls back on when the people around me are using words I don't know. I have automatically said "gracias" to people in Tokyo more times than I care to admit. Moreover, I am not just an American, I am a New Yorker and there are some specific phrases that I have to translate, even when I go to california. These phrases are Bodega and Duane Reade. I barely know how to say them in american, much less czech. So, finding a razor and shaving cream/silicone lube was...difficult. I didn't know if they sold lube in the Czech equivalent of Duane Reade or even what you would call such an establishment. In the rest of America, you call it a CVS or Wallgreens, but I still don't think that translates. At least in Prague a whole lot of people speak english but then I still feel dumb because all these people speak at least two languages and I'm just some dummy getting by on hand gestures. Showering also proved difficult because my hostel used timed switches for their bathrooms so halfway through my shower the room went pitch black and I had to step out into the cold and wave my arms around till the lights came back on. I thought about asking the front desk person if there was a way to avoid this but I figured she would just tell me to take shorter showers and I was in no mood for such european malarky. I really just wanted a croissant for breakfast but then I saw a breakfast buffet that my hostel was offering, which I thought was free but turned out to be kinda pricey but I didn't realize that until I'd already bought it because I'm bad a math and conversion rates are hard. I go to the buffet and it actually looks pretty great, and not your usual american breakfast. Yay, adventure! But adventure comes with a bit of a learning curve, just like everything in a new country. Eating is especially difficult because it's not something you're used to thinking about. Nothing is labled, and the staff is nearly non existant. So I load up my plate with what I think is a savory crepe (actually filled with some kind of jam) and some kind of tiny pancake (it is absolutely not a pancake) and what appears to be cold mashed potatoes (and absolutely *is* cold mashed potatoes.) I pour myself some coffee and open a fridge to pour in milk but then, between my plate in one hand, my coffee in the other, and my backpack getting caught in the refrigerator door, I am spun around and slowly but inevitably pour my coffee all over some kind of delicous looking breakfast pizza. I immdeiatly try to clean up the mess, but can't find a napkin to save my life. I am utterly embarassed and convinced that they will throw me out when I suddenly realize that no one has even noticed. I have somehow managed to do all of this totally silently. So I sneak away, leaving the pizza to soak up its coffee. Thus, I secure my place in the world as history's greatest monster. As I eat my breakfast of totally surprising food, I take a sip of what I thought was very thin juice, but it tastes more like iced tea. I continue to drink it out of sheer embarassment. But then I realize that I'm double fisting caffine and, thirsty as I am, I don't want my heart to explode. I breifly consider hiding my glass of iced tea so as not to look like some kind of bevrage obsessed madman when I inevitably go back to the fridge for some water. But the likely odds are that I would look even more insane trying to hide my glass or that I would do too good a job hiding it and it would sit in some strange corner gathering dust and mold for god knows how long. I watched a pack of german girls blithely devour their breakfasts with nary a care in the world as I glumly stewed over my surprisingly sweet crepe, my coffee soaked breakfast pizza and my three beverages. I thought about that time in Brazil when I'd tried to explore new kinds of juices and ended up drinking some kind of bell pepper concentrate. I wondered if the problem wasn't just me. It certainly may be just me, but I think one of the great things about traveling is being humbled, both by the vast beauty of the world around you, and your own ridiculous bumbling. If you are not humbled by your traveling experince, you are either more cultured and linguistically gifted than I could ever hope to be, or you have spent far too much time in your expensive hotel room and I suspect you are just on vaction. I thought about my Grandfather, who was raised to be a traveling companion for his aunts. He instilled in my mother a love of travel and the idea that, as a traveler, you are an ambassador of your country. He took my mother around the world and my grandmother said that he was only truly sane when they were traveling somewhere. How smart my grandfather must have been, how classy and cultured. When he was sane, anyway. I thought he would be disapointed in my lack of language skills and my general bufoonary this morning. But then I reminded myself that when he wasn't sane he spent a lot of time on crying jags, drinking waterglasses of port in his underwear. So in many ways, we're quite similar.