Monday, September 17, 2007

threadless

It seems that there are times when this shirt would really come in handy. Although...the only time that comes to mind when I've had a complete language barrier was in Turkey, and I'm not sure the t-shirt has a sign for "Ok, it's fine if you don't have a direct bus to Antalya today, but could we get there by taking a bus to somewhere else, then transferring?" Fortunately, I was able to communicate this with diagrams in my notebook. (And it occurred to me later that the guy probably spoke German. Oops.)

Oh, wait, there was another 100% language barrier moment - once in Morocco I had to explain, "No, this is my father, so we'd like a room with two beds." (Most people in Morocco seemed to speak French, but not that lady.) Fortunately, sign language got the concept across.

3 comments:

J.Po said...

Dude! That IS useful. I wish it would have come into my life before ye olde trip to Romania. I was so thankful that I had L.Kess once getting there, but the getting there was rough.

David J said...

I once left my medical supplies (containing my insulin, blood testing stuff, etc.) on a train in Japan, and didn't realize it until we had transferred to our next train in Tokyo. I engaged in quite the hilarious (to an outside observer) pantomime trying to get the woman at the JR desk to figure out what I was trying to say. Miraculously, the JR employees had figured out it was lost before I did. By the time I reported it, it had been found, reported, and written down on about 4,000 different forms that I had to initial and sign before they would release it to me.

Talentedhands said...

I love that shirt! I was eyeing it up on the Threadless site a couple of days ago. In fact, I've bought several Threadless shirts for myself and others. Thanks for sending me there last fall.