Thursday, July 30, 2009

This is a good one...




I made a friend yesterday in a neighborhood called Bon Pasture (I think that's how it is spelled) As I mentioned before there is a serious lack of cats in this city, so I was stoked. I picked her up and she let me hold her a bit, though she was a bit more of a rambuncuous young cat who wanted to play than a docile lap cat who wanted to be held. She bit me a little and pawed at me to get down, although rather gentley, and I think now that I think about it I didn't feel any nails scratching me so either she was very gentle or didn't have claws.

When my group rounded the corner, I picked her up and started walking with her in an attempt to see if I could get her to follow me a bit. I think I forgot to mention before that the area that we were touring is a low income neighborhood where they are doing a lot of rennovation. As I was walking with the cat, a man from one of the houses came out to me, and told me that I couldn't take the cat, because it belonged to someone, and trying to communicate to him that I wasn't intending to take it I said "No me tocar, no me tocar" I said this several times and then said Lo Siento. He didn't seem angry, but he also didn't seem completely with it either, so he didn't really respond to what I said.

When I caught up with the group I told them that I had gotten in trouble for cat-knapping, and they asked me the story and I told them what I said to the man. Two if the girls who speak Spanish said that tocar does not mean take, it means touch and that I had actually been telling the man not to touch me over and over again. If you couldn't already guess, everyone had a really big laugh over this- including myself. I try really hard with the language, but sometimes funny mistakes like this can make my day.

3 comments:

Valerie Geary said...

hehehehe... I love this story. When I was reading through it I was wondering too why you kept telling him not to touch you... : ) Thumbs up for awkward language barrier miscommunications.

jana said...

I love it!! :)\

Doodlez said...

no me toques!
good job babe.