في عربية؟ "Miscommunication" كيف أقول

How do you say "Miscommunication" in Arabic?

From time to time, when traveling in a foreign country (and especially when writing a blog that relates to food), the time comes to eat your words.

This week, it has come for us.

So yes, there is whole wheat bread here. At nearly every bakery. It is the bread that looks like whole wheat bread. We were simply led astray by the fact that they call it “diet bread”, which gave us nightmares about aspartame-laden cancerous white fluffy dinner rolls. But no, it’s merely chubz with whole wheat and no sugar. Even when we first asked our teacher Adela about it, she looked at us a bit crooked and said, “Are you going on a diet?”

But ask for brown rice, and they really do look at you crooked. Even Safeway doesn’t carry it (and when Safeway has a mini-amusement park and no brown rice, you know that you’re in trouble). But alas, we have eaten our words (and over a kilo of whole wheat bread).

We have also eaten nearly our weight in ful. Yes, the real ful, the ful medammes that we were so sure was inferior to our precious white bean “ful”, aka white beans mashed with tahini and cumin and garlic, etc. No, my dear reader, oh no. This ful –broad beans, fava beans, whatever you want to call them, are eat-straight-from-the-can yummy. Rejahn, our “serious” teacher (see below for further explanation), came over to show us how to make the real thing. And, alas, to the detriment of our pride, it is, as she constantly kvells, “too delicious” (the way she talks about food gives you the sense that she is constantly fainting from ecstasy, only to get back up and try it again). Two strikes.

The third time we had to eat our words this week was, well, just a misfired joke. You see, writing dialogues gets fairly repetitive when the extent of your vocabulary doesn’t stretch much farther than the supermarket and two or three books. So you put in jokes. Like, for instance, Daphna goes to Dr. Ben and he writes her a prescription even though he doesn’t know what the problem is (See: DR. SPACEMAN, 30 Rock), and she, undaunted, takes the medicine. All three kinds. Now, we aren’t sure if Rejahn didn’t get our silly satire, or just thought we were clueless Americans who were unwittingly putting our lives in the hands of morons. She made us rewrite the dialogue with Daphna rejecting the medicine and reporting to her husband (aka, just Ben) how horrible the doctor was. “Crazy,” was the word she gave us. We have hence given up all attempts at humor in Arabic.

But we will end with a tale that had us eating, not words, but dinner. We invited two guys who are studying at the language center from Turkey (“Turkeys,” as one of the Italians innocently called them) to come over for dinner, and to show us how to cook the bulgur we bought. Instead, they brought their own Turkish bulgur and pasta, a hookah, and movies in Arabic (including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! It’s like my inner child’s dream come true – the TMNT come back, and I have an excuse to watch them without feeling guilty). The bulgur was awesome (I’m sure that had nothing to do with the fact that it included a quarter liter of olive oil), and it was an altogether enjoyable night. Not only are they co-students, but the three of us have formed a little basketball team, and on Wednesday we came within a point of beating three of the players on the Yarmouk U team. We’ll keep you posted. Plus, next time they come over, they’ve promised to bring the Hagia Sophia (it’s difficult to one-up yourself when you start at this high a level).

We love you all.

Your Arabic phrase of the week is: La ta-ka-luk. Don't worry.