My private Babel

Christmas is just around the corner and since the local construction site manager is not here, I'm in charge of finding a location for our Christmas party. The set-up is rather simple: 80 people, food, 2h open bar. Valencia is full of possible locations, so you'd think it shouldn't be too hard to find an appropriate venue ...THINK AGAIN! Diana and Esther, the funny, lovely and very capable secretaries, have rummaged the yellow pages for about a week and nothing they found matched the requirements. Therefore I went to Valencia today in order to find something. I ended up at the beachfront of Las Arenas where plenty of restaurants are lined up. Most of them are tourist traps with low quality food and sky-high prices, but glancing at the visitors' plates showed which restaurants deserved a closer look. I ended up entering one that looked rather promising. '¿Hablar inglés?' Mind you, these are the only words I can say in Spanish (and most probably even those are wrong). The shrug of the waiter boded ill, and the search for someone who could speak English remained unsuccessful. I tried to call up some colleagues to help me out, but non was available, so I fell back to hand-foot language and we agreed to talk again on Tuesday (at least I guess that's what concluded our "conversation").
IT SUCKS NOT TO SPEAK THE LOCAL LANGUAGE!!!!!!!

Why do we have different languages anyway? Well, I know there are rumors out there in the field of historical linguistics, containing tribe evolution, ice ages and such, that could explain why I ended up lost in translation. But linguistics are a rather boring field for a blog entry, so in this case, despite being a devoted atheist, I prefer the Bible version to visualize the roots of my dilemma. (Don't fret, still godless, but it doesn't hurt to know what you don't believe in). Always funny to see what people come up with when they lack a scientific explanation ;-)

The pics are outtakes from the Brick Testament.
Genesis 11:1-4: The whole earth had one language and was of one speech. As they migrated from the east, it happened that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they settled there. They said one to another, 'Come, let's make bricks, and bake them thoroughly.'
They used bricks for stone, and asphalt for mortar. They said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches the sky. Let us make a name for ourselves, so that we are not scattered across the face of the earth.'













Genesis 11:5-6: Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of mankind were building. Yahweh said, 'Look! They are one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do.'















Genesis 11:6-7: 'Now nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them! Come, let us go down there and confuse their language, so that they cannot understand each other's speech.'













Genesis 11:8: From there Yahweh scattered them abroad across the face of the earth. And they stopped building the city.













Genesis 11:9: That is why it was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth.












THE END