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Comment by José Balido on February 3, 2010 at 8:32am

Dave Barry: If you're a Super Bowl tourist, Do NOT go outside

By Dave Barry

Dear Super Bowl Visitor:

Welcome to Miami! Get ready for a fun Super Bowl week, because you're going to see some serious partying ``Miami Style'' -- people eating, drinking, singing, shouting, fighting, discharging firearms, sacrificing animals, sinking motor yachts and dancing naked around burning buses. And those are our police officers.

Keep reading...

Comment by Indra Chopra on October 16, 2009 at 9:59am

Reading the China Peking Duck experience reminds me of our experience in Shanghai in August 2009. It was around 9.30 p.m. in one of the streets near the Bund area and closing time for smaller eating places. We managed to find one willing to serve dinner and were handed two worn out menu cards. Then proceeded the translating and explaining exercise. We ordered a chicken dish and noodles and no matter whatever way we said the waitress would give us blank looks. She called her fellow workers and it was a sight to see my friend flipping her arms chicken wing style and finally we thought the message had gone across because of the collective 'aah' and smiles. Few minutes later two dishes were placed in front of us and first morsel confirmed our fears. One was pork and the other beef and by now our hunger was turning into anger. My friend did not mind eating beef but being a Hindu I have resisted the temptation to try it out. Rescue came in form of a late staff entrant who in his broken english apologized for the goof up. We still had to pay for the food ordered.

Comment by EnLinea Media on September 30, 2009 at 12:23pm

French, as we all know, is a beautiful language… but it can also be a tricky little bugger, what with its gargling ‘r’ and vowel sounds that come out of your schnozz. No one learned the subtle ins and outs of the Gallic tongue quite like Go-Lo member Baroness Sheri de Borchgrave, whose tempestuous marriage to a French-speaking Belgian Baron ended in tragedy, a true-life Cinderella-gone-horribly-wrong story laid out in her fab book, A Dangerous Liaison: One Woman's Journey into a World of Aristocrac....

Early in the story (page 43, to be exact), our intrepid Baroness, who was last seen on Go-Lo hobnobbing with headhunters in Borneo, finds herself in the throes of passion with the handsome Baron, who in the heat of the moment asks her a most disconcerting question…

“I never imagined how different making love could be with a man with such experience. He could control his timing to climax just moments after me. Once again he asked the mysterious question that sounded like “Are you Jewish?” To which, though finding it strange that he was asking this question, perhaps to further excite himself for some inexplicable reason, I responded, “Oui, oui.”
Later, when I coyly asked him what he always whispered to me at this final moment, he looked at me questioningly and replied, “Do you mean, ‘As-tu joui?”

“Yes, that’s it,” I said, now realizing he spoke in French.

“Don’t you know the phrase?”

“No.”

“It means, “Did you come?” he said, a little embarrassed.

“Yes, yes, that’s what I thought,” I said trying to hold back a giggle. “As-tu joui?” pronounced in French, sounded exactly like, "Es-tu jouive?" (“Are you Jewish?”), especially when whispered in the heat of passion. And I, of course, had always replied, “Yes, yes!”

All in all, a language lesson your high-school French teacher never thought to give...

Comment by David Paul Appell on September 30, 2009 at 10:30am

Anybody see today's "Dilbert"? Ah, that Scott Adams...

Comment by David Paul Appell on September 18, 2009 at 1:17pm

Saw this in my daily paper this morning, and ain't it the truth...

Comment by José Balido on September 18, 2009 at 9:56am

You go, Andrea! A funny travel story, and it even has a budget angle to it! That's the spirit of Go-Lo!!

Comment by Andrea Grill on September 18, 2009 at 9:45am

My husband & I were in Beijing a few years ago. On our last day, we had arranged a tour to the Great Wall. We were picked up at the hotel by a mini bus. It was a gorup of English speaking tourists from all over, mostly businessmen, who travel there frequently but just hadn't gotten to the Great Wall yet. It's a long ride, so we had some really interesting conversations. On the way back (BTW, the Great Wall was a wonderful experience) we had mentioned that we wanted to have Peking Duck on our last night in Beijing. Well, everyone on the bus weighed in on this one. They all told us where to go & handed us cards for the restaurants & told the bus driver where to leave us off. We thought it odd that that the stop was the same for all the places they mentioned. As we got off the bus and rounded the corner, we quickly realized that ALL of them were talking about the same place. I don't remember them, but the restaurant goes by many different names & all of the cards from the restaurant were different. We walked in & somehow someone got us to the 4th floor of the huge restaurant. As you enter the room you see all the ducks hanging. It was quite elegant, though. They seated us off to the side and handed us menus with some extremely limited English. We more or less knew what we wanted & attempted to order Peking Duck with the first waitress. That was a disaster in commmunication, so she sent on the next waiter. In the meantime another western language speaking couple sat down & quickly left because they just couldn't figure out what to order. This waiter was extremely helpful and in his limited English seemed to understand what we wanted. He asked if wanted anything else & suggested mushrooms, so we ordered that, as well.
The mushrooms were brought to the table first and placed in the middle, family style. It was a medium sized round table with a beautiful white tablecloth & porcelain chopsticks. No personal plates were served. We both handle chopsticks well, so that was fine. We start to try to take some mushrooms from the community plate & quickly find that this is an almost impossible task. We could not pick up these slimy mushrooms with these chopsticks to save our lives. Every time we tried, they would slip & fall & now we were making a mess. We had been seated in a long row of tables behind the 3 piece band that was playing. Their backs were to us & they are facing out to an enormous room, filled to capacity with almost all Chinese patrons.
We were laughing and continuing to try to get a least one mushroom up to our mouths. It was starting to get frustrating.
Finally, I get one into my mouth & I start hearing some noise in the room. From the far corner of the room a woman stood up & started clapping & then more people started to chime in. They had been watching us the whole time!
That's when we realized why we were seated in that section behind the band.
Because we were part of the entertainment!
We both just wanted to crawl under the table.
But, we pushed on and the mushrooms were really quite good. And the waiter was so nice, that when the Pecking Duck arrived he patiently showed us how to eat it, and it was fabulous. We even had some dessert. The experience was absolutely wonderful and it cost less than $30 for the two us. Priceless!

Comment by José Balido on September 17, 2009 at 11:53pm

LOL glad to bring a moment of joy to your life, Mr. Wetschler, even if I had to endure another's gastric juices for the privilege. As you know, in the course of being a travel writer one racks up enough wacky anecdotes for an encyclopedia, not all of which can be repeated in polite company!

Comment by Ed Wetschler on September 17, 2009 at 11:19pm

I read this and howled, and I admire you for not having hurled. This is a reminder of Mel Brooks' observation that "Comedy is when you break your leg. Tragedy is when I stub my toe ..."

Comment by Ann Dys on September 17, 2009 at 5:58pm

OHMYGAWD!!! That is too disgusting, and I'm a nurse, I see all kinds of bodily fluids! I can handle them in my office, I don't know how I'd deal with a woman spraying on me at 30000 feet!!!

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