Faith + Reason = Truth

I took the family to Austin for the weekend for a visit to my other hometown (I attended the University of Texas) so that I could take in a Media Day for a cross-country solar car race between high school teams (the Dell-Winston Solar Car Challenge). While there, it was determined that Saturday would be spent at a water park on Lake Travis called Volente Beach, and the first things we noticed on the girls who worked there were the...accents. Unlike the rest of Austin, which is becoming more and more like San Antonio with its large and growing Hispanic population (the Mexican restaurant that we stopped at for dinner on the way into town on Friday not only served great Mexican food and spectacular margaritas, which is why we eat there every time we're in town; it also featured live entertainment with a couple of Ricky Martin and Shakira knock-offs fronting a band that performed only songs with Spanish lyrics, which the kids loved), the water park featured another accent in the mix. My wife said it reminded her of Disney World with the employees having exotic looks and accents. Eastern European was my guess, and more specifically, Romanian. Not that I've ever been to Romania or am in any way familiar with the language; just something about it and the people who spoke it seemed, well, Romanian. They were probably high school age, maybe early college, and as we were leaving, I asked one of them where her accent was from. The girl (one of the non-Romanians) replied, "Columbian." Then I asked why they ALL had either her accent or an Eastern European one, and she said they were all employed there, everyone at the park, as part of a foreign exchange program. She said they were all either Columbian or Romanian, or as she pronounced it, "Ro-MAH-nian." So there you have it - I KNEW I should have worked for the CIA with all of my language recognition prowess!