Long ago, my boyfriend and I backpacked our way across Europe. We flew into Amsterdam and saw the Anne Frank house and the Red Light district. Since he was Norwegian, we next went to Norway and spent the coldest week in August that I’ve ever known. Then we popped over to Sweden and stayed in a hostel, where the bathrooms were unisex. It’s a strange feeling to be sitting on the toilet and to notice the feet in the next stall pointing in the wrong direction.
Then we went to Denmark and spent an uncomfortable day on the beach, because all I had was a one-piece suit and the females on the beach were topless – little girls, old ladies, and everyone in between. Even though my boyfriend and another guy we’d met wanted me to go topless, I didn’t think the top half of my suit dangling down around my hips would look too great. I’d simply look American.
From there we toured Germany and then Switzerland. People asked if we were Americans, but Marcus lied and said we were Scandinavian, because of all the Bush Go Home signs we saw. It was 1983, so the older Bush.
We were traveling on the cheap. I was a poor school teacher and Marcus was a draftsman for an architect. We had our Eurail passes and we camped most nights unless we were on the train or in a hostel. Marcus could sleep anywhere because he’d served in Viet Nam. I was a light sleeper and had restless nights while the train chugged along.
The one thing we did agree on was a simple midday meal of a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, and some pâté from the local butcher shop. After Switzerland, we had a good supply of chocolate for dessert. We would picnic in the town squares or wherever we could find a place to sit and eat our feast.
When we got to France, we gathered up our usual menu and sat down across from the butcher shop to eat. The pâté in a tiny paper package was a darker color than I was used to. It tasted a bit different as well. It was a sharper taste.
“Do you think the pâté tastes weird?” I asked.
“Maybe a little,” Marcus said as he spread some more on a bit of bread.
I looked back at the butcher shop, wondering what the words on the building meant, chevaline? I knew Spanish and the two languages were similar, but there was no word close to that in Spanish.
Then I saw it above the doorway, an iron horse shoe. When we asked for pâté, the butcher had pointed at different things asking us which one we wanted. We had pointed and said pâté a couple of times.
Oh, it was pâté all right, but not made from duck or goose liver. We were eating horse liver.
A revered animal in America, horse was not for eating. We couldn’t stomach the pâté once we knew what it was.
Horse is caballo in Spanish, nothing like cheval or chevaline in French.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 