Making prolonged eye contact with Stan, at first, seemed like it might be an effective way to communicate–but alas to no avail. He spoke only Czech, and I only English, and while one might surmise that a drawing (a drawing that I believed to be quite good, in fact) might cross our language barrier, we didn’t see it the same way. Willing Stan to understand, I pleaded with him–using a look I call ” absolute desperation”–as I scribbled more bubbles into my drawing of a washing machine. Foam. I needed him to guess the word F O A M. Well, the Czech word for it anyway.
“Bubbles.”
No
“Washing machine.”
No
“Clothes.”
No
“Soap?”
NO
A minute later and we were still stuck on the same few guesses. Each feeling slightly exasperated and a little red-faced. Eventually, one of the people on the opposing team leaned over and drew a pint of beer and some foam on top. Stan, shaking his head, guessed “foam” in an instant.
Stan and I had teamed up to play a game called Activity! Which was basically Pictionary-Charades-and-Catchphrase all rolled into one, and so far we were failing miserably. He would draw “lace,” I would guess “hat,” I would act out “kebab” and he would guess “ice cream,” it was fruitless. Except for when Stan performed a very convincing “car crash.” We straight-nailed that one. I realized that it wasn’t just our languages that limited us, it was our worldviews. I came from a middle-class American family, was pretty sheltered, and was gonna be a literature teacher. He had lived a harder life in a small Czech town, worked night-shift for almost 20 years, and had an entirely different value system. It wasn’t just language that allowed us to so often misunderstand each other, it was our backgrounds–well that, and, also Stan might have been a little bit inebriated. At the end of the game (which we miserably lost), he looked at me remorsefully and said, “Very bad tonight.” I laughed and said we would do better tomorrow.
Later that evening, Stan handed me a small glass filled with a blackcurrant sherry and looked me in the eye as we raised a glass to our mutual misunderstandings with a laugh.
Randall's Sandals 