Miscommunications SOLC2013#8

To say I've had a few miscommunications over this year would be an understatement, but today I had a particularly funny one.

So, as I said in my earlier posts, I've been hanging out with university students and the foreign students who have been giving presentations at my high school.  Today after school, I went down to the university, and was able to meet the friends of my friends.  I got thirsty, and asked one of my friend to show me where to buy a water, and he kindly walked me to a store, showed me where the water could be found, then I bought it and was overjoyed with the idea of finally being able to quench my thirst!  Then.... along comes another of my friends, who just happened to also be thirsty.  I was opening the bottle, when he said to me, "Hey! I'm thirsty!" And I immediately went into Insane Thirsty Person mode, mainly because he'd already stolen two of my water bottles previously in the day, and I began making a scene in English.  "I'M SICK OF YOU--" I stopped mid sentence because "sick" translates to something bad in Turkish... like, really bad, and as people turned to look at me I restarted my sentence, and said, "I'm tired of you stealing all  my water today! I'm so thirsty!" He then proceeded to spray the water all over my face, causing me to inhale part of it and end up making people stare and wonder what the heck the two foreign kids were up to.  Anyways, he remained angry for a little while, and I remained confused about the whole situation. A few minutes later, as he was telling someone else what happened, I realized that he thought I told him I was sick of him.  I mean, yeah, I did say that, but I didn't mean it like that.  He didn't know that I dropped the F-bomb in Turkish, so he didn't know that I just stopped mid sentence to restart my initial thought.   I then explained to him what happened and that I was by no means sick of him, and then he said to me, "Well... that got a bit lost in translation.  Okay, we're cool now."  And yeah, we're cool now.

It's funny how these little miscommunications can make for awkward situations. And it's also funny how awkward situations can make for funny stories. I'm happy to have lots of funny stories to keep with me about this year.