English homework in Sarajevo
Updated: Jan 23, 2020
The Balkans diet seems to consist of grilled meats, bread and coffee. Having eaten our body weight in meaty carbs over the past two weeks, The Boyfriend and I had a sneaky
for lunch in Sarajevo.
The waitress was studying English at university so she was keen to practise her burgeoning language skills on us.
After our non-bready meal, she walked over sheepishly and asked me for some help with her homework. “I’ve searched Google and my dictionaries but I can’t work out what BS means. And 31?”, she said, pointing at a highly annotated text.
BS?? That's a rude colloquial phrase: what on earth are they reading at uni, I thought! But it was '3lbs'. To be fair to her, a lot of young Brits probably couldn’t work out what ‘3lbs’ means. It looks like a tyypo.
After a bit of maths, I explained that 1lb = 454g. She looked understandably bemused. It’s not even a round number – what were the oldies thinking with the imperial system?
Hopefully, she’ll be the only student in class who got that right and she’ll think of me!
You can take the teacher out of England….