Matchamonkey

Once, while waiting for a train in Japan, I noticed the sound of birds chirping. "My, that's odd," I thought to myself. "I've never heard a bird chirping while walking outside in Japan. It must be because they've all chosen to congregate inside the train station. I guess when you don't have trees, this is the next best thing." After a while. I noticed that the singing did not vary in any way... the pitch, volume and melody were constant. Of course! It was merely being played though the speakers. There were no actual birds.

More recently, I was shopping for groceries in France. While in the produce section, I noticed that my thoughts were drowned out by the sounds of the rain forest. More specifically, it sounded like a large bird of prey was attacking a spider monkey. Not one to be fulled twice, I knew there were no actual birds or monkeys in the store. By the way, is there some research that shows that sounds of nature make people want to spend more money? Because personally, it kind of made me want to duck and run for cover. I didn't know who that bird was coming for after it got done with the monkey.

After living abroad for almost 4 years, 3 of them in Japan, I assume any nature that I see or hear is contrived and fake in some way. Bird songs are taped, trees occur only in neat rows.

I recently had a two week vacation. I spent the second week in southern France, a place I had been many years before. It was more beautiful than I had remembered, and after the week was over I dreaded heading back to the dreary north. But I digress. I am here to relate a scene I witnessed one sunny afternoon in Monaco.

My father and I had decided to visit the principality during our stay in the south. Since the palace was closed and we were tired of walking, we decided to take a tour of the country on a "petit train." It was a 30 minute tour offered in 10 different languages. In front of each seat were earphones and 10 different buttons allowing the passenger to choose his preferred language. Each linguistic option was represented by a flag. This being Europe, English was represented by the Union Jack and not the good ol' American flag. This presented no problem for my father and me.

After a few minutes, two plump, middle-aged women approached our car and sat down. As soon as I heard them talk, I recognized an accent I had not heard for years--that of my home state.

After speculating for a few moments about what "the others" in their group were doing, they turned their attention to the earphones in front of them.

"I guess these are the languages," one of them said, examining the flags.

"Where's my language?" the other one asked.

"Well let's see... It says here they offer the tour in 10 languages. That would be quite an oversight if they didn't have English."

"Maybe it's in one of the other cars," one suggested. This explanation must have seemed logical to them, because they started to get up to change cars.

Then the light bulb went off.

"Hey wait a minute. What does the British flag look like?"

"I think it's that one," the other one answered. "I sure am glad you caught that. That was some smart thinking." With that, they settled back in and tuned to the British English channel.