Sign language

I have never taken a sign language class.  However, I used it anyway--one day in Sienna Italy.  Actually, I might be wrong about the city, I seemed to have blocked the location from my memory, on purpose, to protect myself from any further embarrassment.

I was with my husband and some of his coworkers one day driving through Italy.  It was time for lunch, so we stopped.  We had to park outside the city center and down the hill as no cars were allowed inside the ancient maze of streets.  We parked, got out, walked a short distance into town and found a restaurant.  It was packed full of Italian businessmen in suits, I noticed this rather quickly as all heads turned to look at me—the woman.  We were shown to a table in the middle of the room and were pointed towards the buffet table along one wall.  In broken, very broken English our waiter told us to go through the line and get the plate and fill it and come back to the table.  I let the men go first while waiting for my cappuccino to arrive—I needed coffee badly.  And then I went.  I should have stayed seated.  What happened next goes down as one of my most embarrassing moments.

The buffet table wasn't like ours in America--unfortunately.  It didn't have decorative dishes, silver utensils and little signs telling us what the dishes were.  No, it was a small table with large platters of meats first, then the vegetables and then desserts at the other end.  Very utilitarian.  As I stood there looking at the foods I asked myself, what in the heck is this stuff?  I didn't recognize any of the meat dishes—no not one.

I looked at the young woman serving the food and asked her in broken Italian—what is this? as I pointed to each dish.  She looked at me and shrugged her shoulders.  That's the universal sign for—what?  I looked at the teenage boy in line behind me with pleading eyes—do you speak English?  He shook his head no. Right.  I'll bet anything he spoke a little bit of English, he just wanted to see what I'd do next.

If you know me at all, then you know that I am a picky eater.  I was not about to eat something without knowing what it was.  It could have been horse, rabbit, or even goat—no thank you!

I thought about my situation for a minute, looked back over my shoulder to my table, made sure no one was looking and proceeded to use barnyard animal sounds and gestures to pantomime the foods in front of me.  The server caught on quickly.  She smiled as the crazy American lady flapped her arms and clucked like a chicken, mooed like a cow and baaaaa'd like a lamb.  I learned a lot in those few humiliating minutes.  One, is that I'll do pretty much anything when I'm hungry and two, is that Italian frogs don't say ribbit.  Who knew?

Once back at my table, red-faced and sweating, I sat down and took a long swig of my cappuccino.

It needed Equal.  Are you kidding me?  How in the world do I pantomime that?  I didn't.  I gave up.

I had some in the car --outside the ancient city and down the hill.

My only solace is that I'll never, ever go to that restaurant again.  Ever.