Something Borrowed

I was talking on the phone with my friend, Tenley, yesterday. She lives across the street from me but is in Paris right now, taking care of Bella the dalmation. We are a tag team. She came up last week to take over from me and we spent a couple days together in Paris before I came back to Aix en Provence.

We were talking about the WORST SANDWICH EVER EATEN, which we had shared one night after our walk with Bella. We stopped at a little Greek sandwich shop and ordered a meat and cheese gyros. I asked for it to go and we ended up eating it trying it and giving the rest to the dog, at a little table outside the shop. It would follow that a sandwich like that would be lamb, feta and veggies and a garlic white sauce....correct? Mais non! Instead it was dried up turkey, smothered in a white, gelatinous, flavorless, substance and topped off with a slice of American cheese. Terrible, terrible, terrible.

As Tenley and I were laughing about the WSEE, she told me I've given her courage to go ahead and just speak the language, in spite of mistakes.

"Why is that?", I asked her.

"Because when you ordered the sandwich, you didn't ask for it to take-out, you asked him to print you out a sandwich! And it didn't matter...you still got the sandwich."

This is an example of how things go when one is prone to muck up a language. No wonder the guy had that stupid smile on his face. And all this time, I thought it was because he knew he was serving us a crappy sandwich and we were falling for it. In fact, if he had printed out a sandwich it would have tasted far better.

Today, I realized that she had it wrong as well. I did not ask for the sandwich to go (emporter), nor did I ask for the sandwich to be printed out (imprimer). I actually asked to borrow (emprunter) the sandwich.

I should have given it back.

Have a great weekend everyone!