When I got to work, the pastry chef was in the office, but then he left. The simple explanation was that he was sick. Fine. But then, around ten, the chef made everyone in the restaurant gather in the dining room. She announced, “Tomas is sick. He has been diagnosed with la gale. He got it from his girlfriend in Brittany, and he has been contagious for a while. It is very unlikely that we contracted anything from him because of limited physical contact, but if you have any symptoms, let me know and we’ll all get treated.”

“What is la gale?” I asked one of the servers.

“Oh, it’s a sickness where you get red blotches and you itch.”

Chicken pox. “I had that when I was young, I can’t get it again,” I said, relieved.

“No,” she said. “This is an old sickness. More serious.”

Small pox? “But I think we get a vaccination against this in the US.”

“No,” one of the chefs says. “People don’t get it anymore. Like the plague, so there are no vaccines.”

Hmmm. Needless to say, for all the interns, the afternoon held a ruthless, top-to-bottom bleach cleaning of every part of the kitchen to rid it of the gale/smallpox/plague. Before leaving in the evening, I saw the server in the office, using the computer. “Hey, do me a favor and look up a translation for me,” I say. She does, and says she can’t pronounce the word on the screen.

Cholera.

Cholera?!

No way.

I look up cholera when I get home, and the symptoms are NOT itching. It is MUCH more unpleasant than that. It seems a little impossible that a restaurant would be so blasé about cholera, so I do another search on la gale. No worries. It is also translated as scabies. Uglier word, much more pleasant health problem. Whew. And I really do doubt that anyone else will come down with it. Plus, I would have been really pissed off if I would have died from this crappy internship.