Lost in Translation...???

Our bus driver for most of the trip was a Portuguese man by the name of Eduardo.  To the untrained eye, Eduardo was a grumpy old bugger, with an aversion to smiling and not much to say that wasn't a direction to anyone erring.  He didn't waste time with heartfelt lead ins when he spoke to the passengers on the bus and frankly, this situation didn't really improve with some of the people being less than charming.  He was a man of few words.

We decided it was our challenge to make Eduardo smile.  All three of us chirped 'hello' at him, offered to help, made little jokes and finally, on about day 3, Cathy got a smile out of him.

This gave us a bit of hope and we knew we had set the bar too low, so the  challenge was now to make him chuckle.  We upped the ante.  In Morocco, early one morning, Cathy needed to ask him if she could get a bottle of cold water once we were on the bus and Eduardo answered her 'Yes, my Freaky ladies'.  Cathy just laughed and came back to us a little bemused, but never the less entertained at being called a freaky lady.  I rained on her parade and said that he probably meant 'Yes, my friendly ladies' as we had been on a make him smile mission.

On our trip back from Morroco, we had to take all our own luggage off the bus and carry it through customs back into Spain, so we emptied the bus and lugged all our things onto the ferry and through the scanners and back through customs on the Spain side.  Eventually, we got to load our stuff onto the bus and there was a group of 10 - 12 of our tour with their bags, while Eduardo put the bags into the bus one by one.  He took mine and as it is rather heavy, he said in a heavy Portuguese accent,  'do you have rocks?  Have you Gibralta in here?' to which there was general laughter.  Then he said 'this bag is so heavy, you will have to stay a month'.  Now, not one to let the laughter fade like and unfueled fire, I replied 'well....... only if you ask me nicely, Eduardo' to which he chuckled and as others started to hoot and laugh, his chuckle turned to a chortle!  He was enjoying it so much, that you could see at least 9 of his 12 teeth!!!

I had no intention of being a freaky lady, or a friendly lady, but the laugh was worth it!  I think a few of our fellow travellers saw another side of Eduardo as well.

Today, we stopped in the Super Mercat (yes, super meercat is a thing here) and I was wandering the aisles, only to discover that Eduardo may well have been right when he called us Friki ladies.  He possibly had not meant freaky or friendly..... he may have just meant we were drunks!!???