Je ne parle pas francais

We, Jenny and Sarah, started our day together at 8 o’clock by preparing the breakfast buffet. Our boss told us that there will be a group of 29 French students today (usually there are not more than 15 people having breakfast). The first three girls (about our age) showed up around 9 and wanted to start their day with a cup of coffee. The only problem: they were unable to use our (normal) coffee machine and a couple seconds later the whole table was flooded with coffee. While we were cleaning up the mess, they tried to explain to us (with their hands and feet, because none of them spoke English or Spanish) that they want to drink their own coffee. So one of them went up to their room and brought a coffee machine down (you really have to love coffee when you travel with your own coffee machine in your suitcase) and plugged it in.

I am personally not a big coffee drinker. That is why I was a little bit confused when one of the students filled a BOWL with coffee and put cornflakes in it after she added about 5 table spoons of sugar. The other ones preferred their cornflakes with milk, but most of them first filled their bowl to the very top (!) with chocolate chips and then tried adding milk. As you can imagine, this did not work out very well and we had to clean up a lot of milk that day. One girl even ate 5 bowls of chocolate chip cereals. 5 BOWLS!!

Breakfast at Samay Hostel is from 7:30 to 11:30. However, three boys thought that the opening hours were unnecessary and arrived at around 11:40 as we were already starting to put things away. One of them filled his bowl again, but this time with milk instead of cereal, and added (I am not exaggerating) half of a cocoa powder package (one package = 500g). I cannot describe the fluid in this bowl, because he did not warm up the milk before and the powder would not mix with cold milk. It must have been unbelievably sweet and gross, but he did not want to swallow his pride and drank the whole bowl.

There were some more things that shocked us, but it is hard to describe them to you, since you did not see them yourself. Nevertheless, we will never forget this day and maybe try learning one or two French words so that we can communicate with French people, who are not willing to or cannot speak English.

If you can think of any weird Austrian tradition or (eating) habit, which may shock foreign people, please leave a comment below.

Jenny