And I’m back from a two-day safari adventure to Lake Manyara and Ngorongoro Crater.  I saw lions, cheetahs, elephants, zebras, giraffes, and a whole bunch of other animals that before this trip I assumed were made up by the animation team of the Lion King.

One of the women on the trip with me was an older French lady who spoke no English.  Our guide spoke no French, so I wound up having to translate for her.  As we’ve learned from those five weeks I spent mis-communicating my way through Mali, there is a lot that I didn’t learn during my 1999-2000 reign as French Honor Society co-president.  Here are some more phrases to add to that pile of would-have-been-helpful-vocab: “harem of impalas,” “migratory patterns,” and any vernacular for differentiating between a leopard and a cheetah. 

Obviously the translations of this once in a lifetime experience for this woman were a disaster.  It was mostly due to my limited French, but also because she kind of started treating me in a daughterly way, handing me her malfunctioning cell phone to fix and offering me sunscreen whenever she reapplied, and there were some things I was just too embarrassed to say to her.  I found myself blushing and dumb when she turned to me to translate the joke our guide had made about an elephant having a fifth leg. All I could eventually bring myself to say was, “That’s a male elephant, I think.”