Water / Honey

There was one morning in Pokhara when I went to a little local café for breakfast. It’s one I had been to before. Quite a local place, though the menus are in English. The staff were great but not particularly confident in English (nor should they be, we were in a café in a city in Nepal!).

The first time I had been in there someone had immediately brought me a glass of water. This is standard practice in most cafés / restaurants in Nepal. This time, however, no glass of water came immediately. This is fine.

I ordered my breakfast (vegetarian breakfast, cappuccino). The waitress brought out my coffee (which was lovely).

She brought out the breakfast (steamed veg, two fried eggs, hash brown, small fruit salad). I asked for some water. The waitress didn’t understand me, I asked for a cup of water, a glass of water. She seemed a bit confused. I tried Nepali, since I know the word for water in Nepali (pani). Though the waitress thought I said honey and seemed quite pleased and confident that she had broken through the language barrier and figured out what the freaky foreigner wanted. I tried to correct her and said pani, water again but to no avail.

I heard her talk to a colleague. I think the colleague asked her if she was sure I wanted honey and not water, but my waitress was adamant.

I was pretty sure this meant I was going to get some honey. That’s fine, I could drizzle some of it onto my fruit salad – it’d be lovely.

She did indeed bring honey. I did indeed drizzle it onto my fruit salad. It was indeed lovely.

This is the sort of thing that happens when travelling. If I could speak Nepali then this wouldn’t have happened, I could have made my wishes clearer. Sure, if she had better English she would have understood me. But the onus is on me since I was the foreign guest in her country. She already speaks so much more English than I will ever speak Nepali.

I probably could have tried harder to make her understand. I probably could have tried again after the honey appeared. But, it wasn’t that important and I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable (nor did I want to make myself uncomfortable). So I smiled, enjoyed my breakfast, thanked her very much, and went on to have a very lovely day.

I’m not entirely sure what the moral of this story is – breakfast is better with honey, perhaps.