Strasbourg in Alsace, 1996.
To this very day my grasp of the French language is embarrassingly inadequate, and advancing age suggests the immediate prospects for improvement are slim.
This only matters because we’re taking a holiday in France, and during the course of the mental inventory, a key phrase returned to me. It was imparted very early during my travels: Une bière pression, s’il vous plait, or “a draft beer, please.”
While traveling overseas in daze of old it was considered good manners to make an effort, however fumbling and ineffectual, to speak a few words in the local language before bowing humbly to the inevitability that natives speak English far more convincingly than Americans.
Hence, learning in advance a few basic numbers, how to say please and thank you, “where is the toilet,” and of course, the way to request “a draft beer, please.”
The pre-digital simplicity of this request, whether expressed in French...
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