Who Brought the Cheese?

Our friend smiled as he recounted our time together at his recent engagement party.  He said, "I spoke with my fiancé and she said that when one of her friends walked into the house and saw Pam the woman asked, 'Who brought the cheese?'"

John belly laughed and I did too.

So now I'm "Cheese."

They eat a lot of feta cheese here which as you know is white.  This last remark has been mentally added to the collection of names that I seem to have evoked from our village here.

If you remember, I have a friend who lives at the front of the village who without fail will greet me and then say, "Entee tomatum!  Entee tomatum!"  (You are a tomato!  You are a tomato!)

We realized that this came with my red face that she sees after I have walked through the city in often sunny and 110º+ heat.

My friends that I drink tea with named me baed or "egg."  When asked if it was because I was white, one lady shook her head and said, "No, there are brown eggs too."  To this day I still have no idea what this means.

Cheese, tomato and egg.  Occasionally I have been called sucar or sugar, but that hasn't really stuck and is used often for everyone like "Honey" in the southern states of the US.

Even now as I type, John chuckled under his breath and whispered…"Cheese."

I can only attribute it to forming good relationships.  Nicknames only come with familiarity.  I am not ready to reciprocate though.  I'm afraid my well-intentioned teasing would become some major social faux paus that would haunt me for the rest of my days.  Right now I'm lucky to pronounce their real names correctly.

So that's it for today.  Cheese signing off.