The Dinner Incident

I forgot to mention the entertainment that we had at dinner last night. Most of the staff here knows English which is very fortunate since I know about 5 words in Spanish. It is still quite amazing how well I have managed to communicate with the only Spanish speaking people around here. Like the guy at the smoothie bar in the mornings. He knows about 5 English words yet still he always is able to make me the smoothie that I wanted. Things didn't work out so smoothly last night for dinner.

Greg and I both ordered a club sandwich and I decided not to eat all my fries. I figured I would bring them back to the room with me for a nice little snack today. A waitress came to our table and I pointed to the fries and said, "May I have a box please?" She looked confused, then smiled and said, "Si." As she walked away I whispered to Greg that I would never see those fries again. She came back (without my fries) and asked, "Dessert? Coffee?" Greg and I had decided that for a little treat we would each have a scoop of ice cream. I told her I wanted vanilla ice cream and I could tell she was quite confused. Then she looked at Greg. Greg said he wanted the same thing that I ordered. She was confused. He said, "Vanilla ice cream." She was confused. He pointed at me and said, "Two." The waitress said, "Si," and left. I whispered to Greg, "I wonder what you are going to get!" A few minutes later a waiter showed up with our check. Or at least a check. It wasn't our check. Our ice cream was taking a really long time and finally we flagged down the waiter and told him that we had the wrong check, that ours should have had two club sandwiches, two cokes, and two ice creams. Just as he was walking away to fix the check, out came the waitress. She had my vanilla ice cream and she put in front of Greg a HUGE banana split. Greg probably would have just eaten it but the thing was so big it probably cost $10. We started laughing and Greg told the waitress, "No. Not this. Just ice cream. Just one of those." All the while he was pointing at my ice cream. The waitress said, "Si," and walked away. A minute later the waiter showed up with our almost correct check, only this one only said 1 ice cream. We decided that Greg just wasn't going to get his ice cream which was not a big deal since it wasn't something either of us HAD to have. I finished off my ice cream and we started to leave. But not so fast because the waiter was headed our way. I just totally busted up when I saw what he had. He reached out and handed Greg a banana! Greg started laughing at that point too and was saying, "No, no." We hurried up to leave before they brought us something else.

Just to clarify, never once during the whole conversation did anyone ever say anything about a banana or a banano. On the way back to the room Greg brought to our attention the Spanish lesson of the day. If a person has a banana split and points to ice cream, it means, "Take what I have here and subtract the ice cream."