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Stories
But I think I am good at it. But my, somewhat puffed up, confidence was brutally aired once. Aired as in I got less puffed up about it and I was made aware of it.
This happend some years ago at the top of the Eiffel Tower, the one in Paris, France. We had come to Paris to go to EuroDisney, but while there we thought it best to see the sights too, we never got to The Louvre, but I don't think my little brother would have appreciated that so my mother probably decided to forego the pleasure of dragging along an unwilling pre-teen. But I digress.
My brother and I, young and healthy and with too much energy, decided we would walk up the stairs of the Tower and we scampered up those steel steps like chipmunks or something equally energetic. Our mother stayed on the ground with her mother walking around in the park which goes from the tower to Ecole-Militaire. So we scampered along until we reached the second platform. There are only the elevators to the third, and topmost, platform so we got on and rode up. Up at the top we ran around and saw the view, obscured as always by lots of smog, and then went to the McDonalds they have up there, can you believe that?, and bought ourselves a coke to drink. Then we ran around some more.
After all that running around, and the coke, I needed to go to the bathroom, I located one and the queue to it. In front of me there stood a rather large woman and to my surprise she started talking to me. She went on and on, and I didn't understand a word, not a syllable, of what she was saying.
I asked myself: "What language is she speaking?" It couldn't be French, could it? English perhaps? Nonono. I knew English, she couldn't possibly be speaking English. What then? German? No. Italian? No. I gave up and said in one of her pauses, very timidly: "I'm from Sweden" hoping this might trigger her possible knowledge of English.
Her reply quite literally boggled me. She said, and I quote:"Oh, We're from Texas". !
This line was delivered in the widest, broadest, the most hillbilly, the most typically Texan accent you have ever heard.
Needless to say I was crushed. I though I knew English and here was this woman who had been talking to me, in English, and I had not understood even one word of it....
97-02-27
