I mentioned the war once, but I think I got away with it...

[Arch]

Bit of a faux pas yesterday.

Out for lunch with some friends, we were seated near the window at the front of the cafe. As we were eating, a party of 4 pensioners came by in the street and looked at the menu in the window and then rather obviously started to look at the food on our plates - we assumed they were assessing the quality, but not being very subtle. We all had a bit of a giggle over it. They wandered on, but then turned and came back and came in, so we had to stifle our giggles a bit. As the waitress seated them (at a nearby table) it became apparent that they were German, with limited English. I reckoned that explained it - if you can't understand the menu too well, you look at the food to see what it's like...

Anyway, time passed and we got talking about the whole Olympic torch thing and my friend was saying it seemed a shame that such a long tradition was being politicised, so I showed off my new found knowledge (learned on this very forum...) with "Oh, no, it's not that ancient, it was all thought up by Hitler and Goebbels...."

And then all my friends gave me a look, and I tailed off a bit. And then one friend whispered "don't mention the war!" and we had to stifle giggles all over again.

I have no idea if they heard me, but I felt a right dork!

 

[Milo]

Dont you know what they did!

 

[Milo]

This reminds me of a story of a guy that was one of the first people on the street to buy a honda.
One morning he was starting his car on the way to work and a major type chap came up to the window tapped on it and shouted dont you know what they did and shuffled off.

 

[Maz]

Nice one, How loud did you say it, Arch?
What was their reaction, if any?

 

[alecstilleyedye]

i can beat that one. my old place of work used to send folk over to medical conferences. on of these happened to be in new york on 11-09-01. you can imagine what it was like, with rumours about what was going on etc. enter a colleague of mine, into a room with a group of eminent doctors from japan, uttering the classic "they're saying it's just like pearl harbour!".

 

[girofan]

Dont you know what they did!

The pensioners or the Nazis?
We, the British, don't mind if someone brings up the subject of concentration camps during the Boer War. Why should the Germans have special treatment?

 

[Twenty Inch]

Not as bad as the mad dictator of Belarus, Lukashenka, going live on air in Germany saying that Hitler was a great man, did a lot for the country, made the trains run on time, ok a few people got hurt but that always happens...

Political analysts think that he basically wanted to be nice to Germans and thought that praising the most famous German leader would be a good way to butter them up.

Personally I wouldn't worry about it Arch. You could have carried on by pointing out that Germany is now the banker and medical provider of choice to all the Central Asian and Caucasus dictators.

 

[Arch]

Nice one, How loud did you say it, Arch?
What was their reaction, if any?

No reaction from them that I saw, but I didn't watch them all that closely. I suspect I was talking in a general conversational tone, so not very loud, but once I'd realised, I became convinced I must have been talking at the same volume as a foghorn...

Also, you just know that even in a general hubbub, some words are going to project themselves at full volume, no matter how softly you speak...

 

[ChrisKH]

I wouldn't worry about it. We have several Germans at work (having taken over the London arm of a German law firm collapse several years ago) and we were talking about things we had as children (sweets, etc). the subject got round to coffee and one young lady was talking about coffee flavoured with sommat or other and I pipped in with Camp coffee (chicory I think) from India and said it must have been similar in the war in Germany, especially in the camps where much of the coffee was "Ersatz". I then realised she was from Berlin and started to stutter......

 

[byegad]

Looking forward to foot in mouth cycling shots in the next Velovision!

 

[Arch]

Looking forward to foot in mouth cycling shots in the next Velovision!

My foot did feature prominently in a pic in Velo Vision once, if I'd realised it was going to, I'd have worn a cleaner, newer sock...

 

[Kirstie]

A friend of mine, hosting a dinner party I attended invited a couple who were mixed race. The woman was white, the man was black. Said friend goes to open a bottle of wine, and asks:
'Would you like white or black wine? er RED, I mean RED wine, well...it's so dark it looks black, err...'
I mean where TF did that one come from?

 

[Dayvo]

Not quite the same, but . . .

I was visiting a friend of mine in Helsinki several years ago with my then girlfriend. We were taking a ferry out to an island in the archipelago there to have a barbie with some of his friends.
There was a group of people on the boat, and one of them, a girl with an American accent, asked if we knew where such-and-such a place was.
My mate said in English with a strong Finnish accent, 'Yes, you follow us!' My friend asked the girl where she was from, but it turned out she was Austrian, and had studied in the US, and therefore had such a pronounced accent.
She then asked my friend if he was Russian (definitley the worst thing to ask a Finn).
'Russian!? RUSSIAN!!! Fack off! Fackin' Russians. spit spit SPIT, Fackin' Russians!'
She then turned towards her friends and said, 'Oh, my friends here are Russian!'
I thought I was going to pi$$ myself laughing or give myself a hernia trying to repress it!

 

[stephec]

Arch, did you do a silly walk on the way out as well?