January 04, 2017

Visitors from Georgia

"We were hosting Nana Chkareuli and Zviad Eradze and an interpreter from the country of Georgia. At the last minute, the interpreter was taken ill and could not come. The guests spoke very little English but we decided to do the best we could. Ken and I only invited one other guest, a lovely 78-year-old neighbor Nancy who has lived a most remarkable life being raised in the old Wild West of Death Valley California by a traveling mining engineer father who moved from camp to camp. As the evening wore on, we got better at communicating and somehow started talking about wildlife in Utah and mentioned elks and our guests had no idea what they were."

Elk Hunting Nancy 4.26.14 Danielle Turner_Taste of Home Hospitality_Utah Global Diplomacyphoto by Danielle Turner

"To our surprise, Nancy said she hunted them in her youth and she demonstrated a perfect elk bugle at the dinner table which we all tried to imitate. This got us laughing so hard and we got sillier and sillier explaining to each other by pantomiming. At this the point the phone rang and it was the interpreter wondering if something was wrong because it was almost 11 o'clock and we had not returned our guests to the hotel. We were all communicating so well without much English that we did not want the evening to end." - Danielle Turner April 2014