Slurpee to Yurpee
Mistakes Could Be Funny
Raise the Tetto
Slurpee to Yurpee
I believe that a trip really begins when you begin thinking of ideas for a trip and then savor each part of the excitement before you are on the trip. You really get your moneys worth when you appreciate the pre-trip…and the after trip!
The pre-trip for us involved delivering a slurpee. A slurpee! Slurpee to Yurpee means that we DoorDashed our way to Europe. Here is how…
Kait and I did DoorDash with the goal of paying for our plane tickets to Europe with our earnings. And we accomplished that over a few weeks of dashing! On Friday nights we would get out of work and jump in the Kait mobile for a “dash”. After a nerve-racking start where DoorDash gave us a double order on our first dash which we quickly figured out, we really got the hang of it and soon loved it. We found it to be lovely in how it helped us work towards a collective goal, was valuable time together that would soon lead to some hilarious stories, and gave us a chance to make a small positive impact on some unsuspecting people. We somehow came up with the idea that after we picked up an order we had the time till we dropped it off to write each customer a unique post-it note pun related to their order. For example, there was an Indian restaurant called Deshi and so we wrote to that customer “We hope your dinner is Deshi-licious”. It was funny and cute okay. And we saw each DoorDash order as a way to get these cute little post-it notes into the homes of millions (okay a few ) Americans.
Now, DoorDashing is not easy. So many things can go wrong from taking the risk to add extra driving to your life especially during the winter in Michigan, to late orders, and customers that don’t tip. But, we had a great time. Sometimes we would dash and then go out with friends and then I would start the cheer “One More Dash!” and we would do a little bit more dashing. It was great. Our top stories were delivering a slurpee from 7-eleven to a mansion around the corner (which then coined the phrase slurpee to yurpee), the Deshi-licious order where a shirtless man came bounding down the stairs towards me to receive his meal and laughed when I said I hope it’s Deshi-licious, and just jamming out as we came up with bad puns to put on our post-it notes. Each dash was an unrehearsed adventure and it had a lot in common with travel. I love Kait’s openness and energy to do DoorDash together. It made me happy to spend this time together as a couple working towards our shared goal of travel. If you were wondering, Kait was primarily our driver and I was our dasher. We worked very well as a Dasher team I might say – maybe one of the best of all time! Just kidding but yea it was a hoot. It felt like all the hard work paid off when we met our goal and bought our direct RT plane tickets from Detroit to Paris with only our DoorDash earnings. DoorDash became one of the unofficial sponsors of our trip and a significant part of the pre-trip. Gas-X is also an unofficial sponsor of our trip. No further comment on that.
Mistakes could be funny
Mistakes could be funny. They could also be costly. But when you are in love and have unconditional love for your partner you can sometimes…okay okay I know what you are thinking – “Davide” what did you do?. So, after finally hitting the Pay button to finalize our plane tickets to Europe I realized that the tickets said David Metler and Kait Metler. Here is the thing: Kait’s last name is O’mara and we are not married (yet) /she did not take my last name pre-marriage!!! The whole taking the guys last name has a sexist history too. But…it was just an autofill mistake that I somehow missed even when I double checked it. So, then I call Kait and break the news to her that she accidentally just became a Metler. It was pretty funny to us. Maybe a little rushed but hey Kait Metler has a good ring to it. The not funny part was now I had to call Delta and change her name back and as one who is an oversharer (as well as an overwiper just sayin) I was suddenly wondering how to break it to Delta that Kait was changing her last name back to O’mara. That we were now potentially going to be seen by Delta as separated or divorced but still going on a trip together to Europe?!?! I mean the real story was that it was a simple mistake but it was a pretty funny mistake to undo. So, anyways I spent over four hours trying to connect with a ticket specialist over Delta’s app, was on call-back for their actual phone line, and then finally had someone switch it back pretty easily actually after all that. Mistakes could be funny when your in love.
Raise the Tetto
Learning a language with your lover could possibly be one of the most romantic things to do together. Language opens up the possibilities for connection and learning a new language allows you new opportunity to connect with each other and those who speak that language. I had learned 5 years of French, quite a bit of Spanish, some Hebrew, a little Arabic, and some sign language and one of my goals has been to be fluent in another language enough so I could make someone laugh (not at my accent but at the content of what I was expressing). Kait also has a background in French.
With all this language background we decided to learn Italian in preparation for this upcoming Euro trip (also thinking we may want to live in Italy someday or be at least be able to sweet talk with a cannoli.) I had used Preply.com before to learn languages and found it to be affordable and reliable. The first teacher we selected was a bit strict without much of a sense of humor and Kait and I agreed we should maybe try another one before committing. That is how we found Umberto. Umberto is an Italian graphic designer living in London (now in Indonesia) and he was playful. He is exactly what we were looking for in an Italian teacher. At one point before asking me to say a phrase in Italian he said “Davide don’t f*** this up” and to Kait when she said a word that started with the sound “moooooo” understood why it was so funny that it felt like time stopped during that utterance when I looked at her with an impressed look. He is super funny and energetic and seemed very organized in his teaching methods. Although at some point Kait and I realized we were having pretty much the same lesson every time we took accountability for it because we rarely practiced between lessons after the first few weeks and began to schedule lessons a bit too infrequently to remember what we had done last!
It is not easy to learn a new language as an adult in general but especially when you are not immersed in the language or need to use it in your daily life and when life gets busy it is hard to keep a commitment to practice. Nonetheless we had a ton of fun. It is a beautiful and vulnerable thing to learn a language together with your lover. It is stepping into the unknown. It is the discovery of new words and expressions that release your previously held notions and limitations. It is love languages – the sound of them, the way you slow down to pay attention to the detail of how each letter and accent sounds, and how you trudge through it and mess up all the time together. Somehow our favorite word became – tetto which means roof in Italian. Probably not the most useful word to know but hey at least we could say “Raise the tetto” when we got to Italy.
