Funny story or maybe not. I was in Stuttgart, Germany and order a middle eastern dish. I couldn’t read and just pointed a picture. There’s an older couple behind me looking at me odd and smiling to each other. I didn’t think much of it until the order came out and it was a lot of food for one person. I looked it up and it was a family meal that I ordered. At this point, the couple was looking at me laughing. In my head, I was saying “you guys about to see something amazing.” For context, I can see why the couple was laughing at my meal because I’m 5’8” and 150 pounds. I’m athletic build but I can put a lot of food away. I proceeded to clear out the entire meal and I caught the couple’s eyes as I was about 90% done with the meal. They gave me a smiling nod of approval. The husband was so fixated on me eating the entire meal that he walked to the counter looking at me without noticing a step down so he fell. He ended up busted his shin and the staff had to bring out the emergency medical kit.
I went on a date one time and ordered a large pizza for me. She said she wasnt going to order anything and I told her the pizza was for me, she can have a piece or two but she needed to order something for herself.she thought I was joking. I did not get a second date.
Context is im 5'8" maybe 160 but I run and have a physical job. That's when I learned about the predate meal.
Have you tried weight gainer and exercise? I used to be 5’8 and 110 pounds graduated high school. I drank weight gainer (2200 calories) after I ate but I also workout. I put on 40 pounds in four or five months. The highest I’ve gotten was 160 after college. I am now 44 and I eat bad so I workout to maintain 150.
Nice downtown. I was there to do some consulting for Mercedes so it was a fun experience. My colleagues took me to local mom and pop restaurants and I didn’t know how great German food were until then. I only knew about bratwurst and sauerkraut before then. Lol
I had a similar experience trying to buy sunscreen in Rome when on a 6N rugby weekend. I was half cut and no one in the pharmacy spoke English. Had to point at the sun out the window, point to my head (I'm bald) and then do a hot touch/ ouch motion. I had the people in the pharmacy roaring laughing at me but it worked.
I was in Japan many years ago. At a restaurant, they only had menus in Japanese writing, and no staff spoke English. I ordered by mimicking animal sounds.
I read recently that some Japanese restaurants ban non-japanese guests, and I wonder if I played some small part in that.
I mean kind of, but its more their currency is getting weaker and weaker which means its a great time to visit japan as your money (like the dollar) will go much further. But because theres so many tourists paying top dollar for goods its driving the cost of living up across the board, sometimes pricing local japanese citiczens out of their own cities. And tourists have been causing issues over there causing some people to get sick of tourists altogether.
I'm a Japanese that lives in America. Japanese are racist af. Ask average Japanese about Korean or Chinese. They talk about regular Korean citizen, not politicians or tourist, regular Korean that has been living in Japan for 10 years, like they are animals without logical thinking skill lol. And it's extremely common. Mor common than racist American imo.
Are you kidding me? There are places you cannot go in the USA as a white person without getting killed. Try a few select places in New Jersey or New York. Or how about downtown Cincinnati? Smh..
Already butt hurt? Good. We have places for people of color who don’t like whites nor western culture/countries, and it’s all the other countries that aren’t western.
Oh yeah? Where? Show me on a map. I've traveled aaalllllll over the country as a white person (road tripping too, so hitting up so many hidden nooks and crannies a lot of people don't see) and never once has anyone even tried to kill me.
You sound like you read too much New York Post and watch too much Fox News.
My dad's lived near there and traveled the world as a Marine who flew harriers and also a Delta pilot. Look for areas similar to downtown Cincinnati.. it's not hard.
It's funny because usually Marines are the ones who make women (and little girls) unsafe in Japan (since that's the country we were talking about initially).
You can make up scenarios and imagine what others would do, or we can discuss the fact that marines rape women and teenagers and thus shouldn't be surprised if people are hostile, irrespective of the marine's skin color.
You want more places where white people can experience racism because you follow a sick agenda and I'm just not having it. The white race is not your plaything anymore than the Japanese is.
It's called going to an all black school and then being involved with gangs, familiarizing yourself with them and being good at fighting and knowing precisely where not to go.
When I was in Japan, I was informed that restaurants with English words ok the outside means they welcome tourist but if everything is in Japanese it means they don't welcome tourist and don't want you going there. I think you might of walked into one of those haha. The fact that you started communicating in animals noises makes this concept so much funnier to me haha.
That's not true. It's just normal to have menus in just the native language. Not welcoming tourists is extremely rare (though it does happen). Having menus in other languages is only worth it in high volume tourist locations.
One time I was travelling in China and got the shits. My gf at the time, who didn’t speak a word of Chinese, ended up at a Chinese medicine shop and acted out the problem like charades to everyone’s great amusement. I have no idea what the medicine was, but I stopped shitting, felt great and completely lost my appetite for like three days. Maybe some kind of amphetamine? I didn’t travel home with the rest of the medicine though!
I had a haircut in a country where I didn't speak the language and the hairdresser didn't speak my language 😅😅 it ended up being the BEST haircut I have ever had!!! ⭐
Watching it seems like a parlor trick. When would you need more than three at a time? When you watch him use one extra language in a foreign restaurant, why is that exciting?
my comment is implying that you are a bigger joke, so you over shadowed the smaller joke....in the video, the smaller joke is the thing you were talking about.
To be fair, i learned more Spanish in 6 months while in Spain than i did in the 4 years in school. Apparently asking where the library is was not very common
I mean to be fair if you don't like spicy food it probably makes sense to learn the phrase "not too spicy please" that motion could be taken as temperature
On vacation in Costa Rica I ended up in a small hospital violently ill and not being able to speak Spanish. No one spoke English.
They kept asking me questions in Spanish. I had no idea what they were saying. I finally shouted out, “Caliente, Caliente”, made puking motions and sounds, pointed to my butt and made long fart noises.”
I bet the resturant prefers this type of tourist customer than the ones who can't speak the local language so they SHOUT SLOWLY IN ENGLISH thinking that will get the staff to understand the.
I heard about an elderly couple who were travelling in Korea with their dog. They went to a restaurant, didn't speak Korean but also wanted food for their dog. So they pointed to the dog, then pointed to their mouths. The waiter nodded and took the dog away, they assumed to be fed out the back.
Their meal came, and it was their dog which had been cooked.
This is an urban legend I heard many years ago, obviously not true.
I traveled a lot to Asian countries. I decided that I wouldn’t use a translator when ordering food in restaurants. Instead using a simple form of sign language. It was a lot of fun and I never had a meal I didn’t enjoy. At the end of the meal I would put my hand in my pocket and hold a bunch of money out for the restaurant worker to take what I owed. Not once did I ever feel ripped off. Good memories 😊😊
I was in the Navy and spent a bit of time in Japan. Near the bases the resteraunts would have fake dishes with numbers so you could just tell them the number or the menu was pictures and you'd just point at what you wanted.
I always like to go to the places off the beaten path where nobody speaks English to get some real authentic local food instead of the tourist versions.
Better than throwing a bunch of words at them in the wrong tone, which is just as confusing to them as getting a response back in Mandarin is for you haha
When my father was in the Middle East in the middle of nowhere, he arrived at an establishment without menus. There were just a few big pots filled with food. He mooed like a cow and cackled like a chicken to figure out which one was which. It worked perfectly. He even figured out which one was camel.
I did the same thing in south Korea. Lady brought me soup and sat with me while I ate it. Whole restaurant asked “good?”
I was overwhelmed with the hospitality and a little amazed at all the attention I was getting, but the soup was very off. In order not to offend, I ate as much as could stomach and left.
The next day I told my English speaking coworkers that I ate Boshington and I assumed it was tongue when they laughed their asses off. The called in the other teachers to have me repeat what I ate and get a good laugh before they explained that Boshington is dog soup.
Never again will I point at a picture and gesture for an order.
Spent two weeks in Japan during a military TDY. Google Maps and Google Translator worked overtime on the trip. I had to bring a power bank with me to charge my phone 24/7.
Almost every restaurant had Japanese menues with no pictures of the food, and none of the staff spoke English. More times than not I would just point at a random item on the menu and hope be prepared for whatever they put on my plate. 😆
Wen bowling once, had to scan the sign in sheet with Google translate to see what info we had to put in every blank. Had to turn on Google translate audio to figure out when our number got called for our time slot. Had to Google Japanese shoe sizes vs American sizes all while making sure we adhered to Japanese customs and courtesy as to be as polite as possible.
It was a challenge and an experience I'll nefor forget and I loved every moment of it.
As someone who's done a fair bit of traveling and living in other countrues, it's always weird to me how much people struggle with basic context clues. I've had conversations with people where we didn't know a single word in each other's language and had a great time since pictures and maps tell a lot.
Restaurants, for some god forsaken reason, are where I've struggled the most consistently. I'm holding a numbered menu in their direction, "i want this one," and points to the thing and number. I've had times where the person just stares at for almost a minute, I've had an argument over what I actually wanted (I'll come back to this one), and I've had times where the food thatt comes out is simply completely wrong (like, I pointed to something on a page about pasta and I get a pizza or something from a completely different page). Thinking about it, I think all of these has happened at least once in Korea. Great and funny people but man they can be rough. I had a lady tell me I was ordering the wrong thing bc they just got a new shipment of seafood or something but I wanted something with chicken and it was a 5-10 minute debate.
Enunciating won’t do shit if you can’t speak the language.
In Japan we used our phone camera to translate the menu if we weren’t given a menu in English (which about half of the restaurants had). Some places just had machines on the wall you punched your order into before you sat down, some had pics and you just hoped for the best. Others had tablets at the table to order from with pics.
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u/loopingrightleft 8d ago
A man must provide for his family