Fair warning, this edition of Short Tails is not for the faint-hearted. There will be some lude (but funny!) references and talk about things of an adult nature. I’ll do my best to explain things in a PG manner but I’m not sure it’s going to be entirely possible for most of this article.
Lost in Translation
Over the last few years of traveling, Hannah and I have encountered our fair share of cultural and language barriers. From having to learn to eat exclusively with chopsticks in Vietnam to conversing with doctors in Bali there’s not much we haven’t come up against in the last 2.5 years on the road.
However, in this article, I want to talk about 6 specific interactions where being from another country, namely the UK, has led to funny conversational mishaps. I’ve had this article in the works for a while, so let’s see how it goes!
1 – Interesting Name for Throw-Away Food Donations
Now, most UK residents should get this one, it’s a nice light-hearted one to kick things off. While house sitting in Tucson, Arizona for 6 weeks, we volunteered at a local food bank. Our tasks included sorting and preparing donations to be handed out to the local community needing a little extra support.
We helped 2-3 days a week and enjoyed our time there. We met many friendly locals and fellow volunteers and felt we were helping our temporary local community.
The food bank’s rules stated that any produce reasonably past its sell-by date or damaged should be thrown away. These foods were known as ‘tossers’! This moderately offensive phrase which refers to a solo sexual act hasn’t traversed the pond, and Hannah and I found it childishly funny throwing produce in the trash and yelling ‘absolute tosser’.
2 – Joy’s Cupboard of Shame
Entrant 1 of 2 on this list for our good friend Joy, with whom we spent 3 weeks volunteering during the first few months of our travels in early 2022. A Scottish ex-pat living in Italy, she was our first-ever Workaway host who accepted us without any previous references on that platform.
It was a wonderful experience, and we helped primarily with maintaining her huge Italian garden on the outskirts of Rome. We did everything from pruning olive trees, mowing lawns, building irrigation systems, and graveling the driveway. We enjoyed lots of great food and wine, and many conversations around the dinner table.
It was during one of these conversations that Joy referred to her jam-packed and unkept walk-in pantry as a glory hole! We advised her that in certain adult circles a glory hole was a very different thing and telling people you have one at home might not be the wisest decision. If you’re unaware of what one is, Google it carefully.
3 – Italians and Their Sexual Metaphors
This one goes back a few years to before we officially left the UK. I was intensively learning to speak Italian, so much so that I went to live with 2 families in Italy for 6 weeks in 2018. The experience helped me a lot with the language and culture, and we made some lifelong friends along the way.
My first placement was to the south of Rome in a small town called Velletri. In exchange for helping me with my Italian every day, I helped Luca and his wife, Marissa with the day-to-day running of their small farm. We drank plenty of red wine, I ate like a champion and learned the hard way that Italians have a sexual reference for everything, especially vegetables.
There are some obvious ones which again you can cautiously Google. But whilst preparing dinner one night I casually turned to Luca and said ‘Devo auitarti con la patata?’, thinking I’d asked ‘I need to help you with the potatoes?’. Marissa burst into rapturous laughter, and Luca also in hysterics informed me I’d used an incorrect tense and actually said ‘I need to help you with the p***y?’.
4 – When One Beer Isn’t Enough, Find a Better Phrase
Y’all might remember Grant from Texas, he cropped up in an early episode of Short Tails – Welcome to Texas. We lived with him and his wife, Polly at their beautiful home just outside of Waco. It was another Workaway exchange where we helped Grant with general day-to-day tasks. Although it was hot as hell in Texas and the work was at times tough, we balanced it out with plenty of R & R.
Grant was a stickler for being at home and in his lovely swimming pool by no later than 3 pm. We could almost set our watches by Grant’s daily trip to the beer fridge, grabbing 2 cans of beer and commencing his daily dip in the pool. He never drank alone and usually with country tunes blaring we’d join him for a few beers.
A few days into our stay he referred to the concept of having two beers, one in each hand and thus saving a walk back to the fridge for a second, as being double-fisted! Do not Google that one, if you’re not sure, just believe me it’s a pretty hardcore thing! We informed Grant that it was perhaps best to use the British version of being double-parked in the future.
5 – Joy Strikes Again
Back in Rome with Joy once again. We had a great exchange with her and have kept in touch, even meeting again last year when we flew from Rome to the US. We had lunch together by the sea and caught up for a few hours.
It was during this catch-up that Joy kept calling her daughter’s boyfriend ‘her John’. Joy, innocent as always, was unaware that referring to the boyfriend, whose name is John, as ‘her John’ made it sound like her daughter was a lady of the night – a John being a name for men who use such services.
I’m sure her daughter will be quick to agree that simply ‘John’ is enough when he’s being discussed moving forward.
6 – Knocked Up in New Zealand
As a late addition to this post, this is something that cropped up just yesterday that I felt was worthy of inclusion. We’ve met lots of nice new people during our time in Goolwa, Australia, where we are house sitting for two months as I write this article. We have already been invited out on several boat trips and to the local pub for a weekly catch-up.
Whilst chatting with some new friends, one a native New Zealander at the pub informed me he’d recently been back to NZ and knocked up an old friend of his. Surprisingly, his wife didn’t seem too concerned by the situation!
It turns out that to knock someone up in NZ is to simply meet up with an old friend and have a good catch-up and not impregnate them as was my understanding of the phrase.
Conclusion
Look at how traveling can expand your mind, vocabulary, and understanding of international sexual metaphors!
Some of these memories are among our fondest and we look back on them often and laugh. We’ve met so many great people in the last few years and for us traveling is all about the experiences and friendships you make along the way.
We stay in touch with most of our previous Workaway and house sitting hosts and have open invites to return to many of them. For more information about house sitting and the amazing website we use to facilitate about 95% of our travel, read my previous article – ‘Everything You Need to Know About Trusted Housesitters’.
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*Permission given to use all photos of pets and homes.