You Say Aubergine, I Say Eggplant

A couple weeks ago, we were having lunch at the girl's fave restaurant here in our little London suburb.  My husband and I think it's fine, but the girls absolutely love it.  We typically end up eating out once a week, and this is always the restaurant name which pops out of their mouths when we (ignorantly) ask them where they want to go.

Nando's specializes in grilled chicken and that's about it.  If you don't like your chicken grilled, on a bun, or in a wrap, then you're gonna leave this restaurant mighty hungry.  I contemplated ending that sentence with the word screwed, but it just sounds so déclassé, which is chichi froufrou speak for low class.  Darn these Brits and their proper language rubbing off on me!  This restaurant was recommended to us by another expat family because it serves bottomless fountain drinks... and of course it's healthy, blah-blah-blah.  But seriously, you just don't get free refills over here at pretty much any other restaurant AND you get self-serve ice, too.  Most places you have to ask for ice in a fountain drink, including the drive-thru at McDonald's near my Costco.  That's the only drive-thru McDonald's I'm aware of and it's about 45 min from the house.  

So we were at the restaurant and the youngest daughter needed to go to the restroom.  Since we're girls and you have to make sure they're trained early on about all the important girly practices/rituals, we trotted off to the restroom together.  We tried to get the teenager to join us - the more the merrier.  And just a side note - in Europe it's referred to as the toilet.  Over here you only call it a bathroom if it contains a bathtub.  And restroom just earns you a blank stare.  

We both took care of our business and were washing our hands.  Another side note - public restrooms in Europe as very ecofriendly and thus you'll always find a hand dryer instead of some sort of paper product to dry your hands.  Some folks in our family like to bend down and direct the blast of warm air down the front of their shirts, and run it through several on/off cycles if no one else is standing around waiting her turn.  Maybe I need to start writing travel books, obviously of the redneck sort, with all sorts of helpful little hints like this.  

Back to the story - I notice the 10-year-old is standing in front of the feminine hygiene products dispenser shaking her hands while I dry mine under the blower.  When the machine cycled off, I told her to come over and get her own hands dry.  She turned around and told me that she needed £1.  When I asked her why, she explained to me that she wanted to buy one of the napkins in the machine to dry her hands.  

I walked over to the dispenser expecting to see this, but instead of being labeled "pads" they were called "napkins".  Wouldn't that have been a sight to behold?  But hey, maybe she's onto something.  They are really absorbent and soft due to the location on the body where they're utilized.  However, I'm afraid that's thinking just a bit too far out of the Kotex box, bahahahaha!  When I explained to her what THESE napkins were, she was all grossed out as if they had loaded the machine up with used ones.