huevos con vino

I love this sign in my hotel bathroom.  It’s not “if” you go for a sauna, but “when.”  It’s only a matter of time.  I actually did go for a sauna yesterday and it was really wonderful.  I had the entire top floor of the hotel to myself, in fact!  Very nice. 

A word on breakfast.  Every morning here at the Holiday Inn, I stroll downstairs and help myself to the well-apportioned breakfast buffet.  I usually have tiny bratwurst sausages, or beef meatballs, or black sausage as my primary meat.  Sometimes I get all of the above.  I always make sure to get 2-3 silver dollar pancakes of potato, which are really like giant, flattened tater tots.  Delicious with meat.  Today I tried the “scrambled” eggs, which are just poached eggs separated after cooking.  Not bad.  The breads are all baked daily and they are all incredibly good, as in “I’d walk to that bakery every morning” good.  And just this morning I found the fresh-squeezed orange juice.  Until today, I had been drinking pineapple juice, which is known as “ananas” juice.  Easy to confuse with “bananas” when you speak English all the time.

Speaking of “ananas,” the night before my presentation I made a bet with one of my fellow seminar attendees.  I bet her $10 that she wouldn’t be able to include the word “ananas” in her presentation.  She accepted the bet, but then another attendee suggested a terrific twist: I could win back 5 Euros if, when this girl did say “ananas” during her presentation, I stood up and vocally objected to her use of the word “ananas” in such a professional setting.  I laughed and said she’d never do it, but then she came up with a clever way to include the word (basically by comparing “apples to pineapples” during her presentation).  We shook on it.

Later that night, I realized I needed to preempt her use of this analogy.  So I decided to use it myself, but first I taught myself the Finnish word for apple (”omena”).  I had memorized “ananas” from previous Europe trips; pineapple gets translated as “ananas” in other languages as well.

The next morning, I was the first to present.  I got about 90% through my presentation when I suddenly said, “Yes, this sort of analysis is challenging because, if done incorrectly, you will end up comparing apples to oranges or, as you might say here in Finland, ‘omena to ananas.’” 

It was a devastating comment. 

The people who were in on the bet began laughing very hard because I had managed to say “ananas” completely unannounced right before my betting partner needed to say it in her own presentation.  In particular, the woman against whom I was betting raised her fists in the air and shook them at me vigorously.  This reaction, which made no sense to everyone sitting around her, prompted a lot of attention in her direction.  The other 40-50 people in the audience simply laughed because I made up a Finnish colloquialism and managed to say two Finnish words, which is harder than it seems.  It was fantastic.

But then it was the woman’s turn to uphold her end of the bet.  In making my comment about analysis methodologies, I had inadvertently opened the door for her to say “ananas” in her own presentation.  Which she did.  Again, everybody else laughed, but those of us who knew about the bet couldn’t believe how deftly she managed to win.  It was a wonderful joke all around, in part because only a few people knew about it, and that made it funnier for us by far.

This all occurred on Wednesday morning.  The conference wound down that day and we went out drinking for about 8 hours.  Actually, it was exactly 8 hours.  It was “an entire workday of drinking and chatting,” as one person put it.  I was so energized after we left at 1 AM, I couldn’t get to sleep until about 3 AM.  But that was Wednesday…and, amazingly, Thursday is coming to a close.  I have a lot to share from Thursday, involving moose and a town named Ahtari.  I can only assume you pronounce that as “Atari,” like the old video game system.  It’s all in my next blog entry, coming soon! 

And don’t forget to bring your towel when you go for a sauna.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is filed under travelog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.