A Bit of Honey, Too?
A few years ago, a friend and I took a night train from Hungary
to Romania. Both of us were Peace Corps volunteers in Hungary,
and were trying to supplement our basic knowledge of Hungarian
with a crash course in Romanian, taught to us by a friendly
couple on the train. One of the first words they taught us was
the Romanian for "thank you": multimesc.
At five in the morning, we arrived in the town of Brasov
in Transylvania, a town with a large Hungarian population. While
my friend Peggy watched our bags, I ran around the train station
getting information on hotels, tourist sites, etc. Not realizing
that my Hungarian could be spoken here, I tried to use my new
Romanian. But when faced with actual Romanians, all of the new
vocabulary left my head. I tried to remember the word for "thank
you" -- was it micimacko? The word sounded familiar. So every
person I met I thanked--the lady in the information booth, the taxi
stand attendant, a man who held the door for me. I put down their
strange looks to my accent.
Finally, someone gave me such an outright stare that I doubted
myself. I went back to Peggy.
"What was the word for `thank you'?"
She looked it up. Multimesc.
I told her that I'd been saying micimacko, a word that seemed
familiar to her too. It wasn't until we returned to Hungary that I
found out what I had actually been repeating to everyone -- the
Hungarian word for "Winnie the Pooh."
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