The art of conversation

On my arrival in Vilnius, I met up with M. as arranged, only to discover that she had almost entirely lost her voice, due to a throat infection. To conserve what was left of her voice, she used my iPod Touch to write out messages to me, leaving me with a lengthy and sometimes bewildering record of our asymmetric conversation.

Tactful as always, I suggested that she needed a beret and some white greasepaint. She tapped back:

am not the only mime
White with zinc sunscreen

We then moved on to discussing our food options:

Pizza til midnight
More testosterone in old town

If I hadn’t seen her start to type ‘restaurants’ before auto-correct had its way, that might have left me severely puzzled.

We also talked about Riga and Vilnius

We can go there Otis the big baltic port no was
Vilnius has been small for a long time
It was rich here a millennium ago
Sculptures that look like the chess set 
in the British museum
Russian
Cars here are big like the states

and the language barrier

How did you find communicating
Pharmacy medic speaks good wnglis
All the beggars in the park acros the street speak German
Once I was known as foreign and German I could not sit there

When we left the bar, we walked in front of the cathedral, with its more than life-size statues, one of which appears to be wearing kitty-ears. I hazarded a guess that it was probably Moses, and the projections were probably the horns that Moses – and, by extension, all Jews – were once believed to have had. M.’s only response was:

Jewish
W t f

Another of the features of the cathedral square is a statue of an armored and caped knight, leaning forward from his pedestal at a perilous angle, while his horse trots up behind him as if ready to give him a shove. M. commented:

Like that old chess set it's all mindinaugus

which made it my turn to say “Wtf?” (She later corrected herself; it's Gediminas, not Mindaugas).

M. has been kept busy since her arrival:

I have been asked to take many photos
Silky people don't know my pics are blurry

We had supper:

R's schmecht gut
This is going to make me sneeze
More blue cheese than dill
P m g I has something gross yesterday 
I think it was smoked yogurt

before our conversation trailed off into small-talk:

Breakfast is good
How far was the bus station
A mile
You have not Ben wearing
Enough sunscreen