Travels And Reflection A blog of my journeys and the lessons I've learned.

Dulce and I had an early lunch in one of the Chinese teahouses that commonly found around Paris. We were on a tight budget so we planned to have our meals at the cheapest places we could find. This particular teahouse, the first of many that we would regularly eat in, was run by a young Chinese couple who greeted us in French but soon switched to English when we told them that we were tourists.

Dulce and I were discussing in our native tongue about which of the not-so-wide array of dimsum delights we would purchase. At the same time, the couple were also conversing in their native tongue. I could just imagine what one would remark when he or she would suddenly enter the tea house at that moment: Sacre bleu! Je suis dans la Tour de Babel!

During the course of our meal, I suddenly asked Dulce, just for the fun of it and because she could understand Mandarin but could not speak it, to translate what the couple were talking about. We just stopped talking then focused our ears on them while munching on our lunch of pork dumplings and "fresh" spring rolls. Then she told me in our language every detail of their conversation. Actually, there was nothing juicy to report: all business related stuff like delivery schedules and such. Then as we were beginning to laugh at the shallowness of our exercise, they suddenly just stopped talking and kept quiet.

We looked up slowly and saw that they were staring directly at us.

I think our whispering coupled with our stolen stares at them gave us away. Dulce told me that they knew we were listening in. We just played it cool. We then quietly and quickly finished our lunch then washed it all down with warm tea (hot turns to warm quite quickly in the Paris springtime), and with much shame, got the hell out of there. We laughingly vowed to ourselves never to return and to be less conspicuous next time.