Travels in a Tin Can

She then made to walk away, leaving the slugs and apparently seeing the
sandwich as a new order. Quickly Emma tried to clarify things: 'I ordered the
sandwich before'.
'OK' said the waitress: 'Sorry'.
However, she obviously still intended to leave the plantains. I pointed out that
we did not want them, having never ordered them, and the waitress took them
away. At this point I think she realized what had happened and she spent the
rest of the meal chuckling to herself and apologizing. We spent the rest of the
meal thinking about how she could possibly have got confused. Recalling her
accent we realized that when she said plantains it actually sounded like 'b-lan-
tains' - quite similar to 'BLT'. Even so, who would order a plate of fried
plantains, small bananas as far as I know, with soup? At least the food was
good, especially the pie. We saw several people taking away whole pies -
maybe this is the trick, do not eat there, just 'hit and run'. Emma did finally get
the BLT by the way.
Linguistic obstacles did not only arise in the food domain, though
obviously this was the only time when they had the potential to be life-
threatening! Quite often I received blank looks because of using UK English
instead of the US version, for example saying 'bill' instead of 'cheque' in
restaurants. Emma adapted more easily to American-isms, even telling
someone where we 'made our toilet' in the van, rather than saying 'there is the
loo' - why she told someone this is another story, too long to recount here.
Sometimes we had UK English quoted at us by the Americans, most
memorably a waiter told Emma she had a 'where's the bog?' look when she
approached him - charming!