A funny faux pas

Sometimes you find out that you have been committing the funniest faux pas days, weeks, or months after moving to a country. Faux pas are a natural occurrence when living abroad. A friend living in Brazil as an exchange student years ago told me that weeks after arriving she was corrected by a baker after asking for some bread pão which she was saying without making the nasally, distinct  ã sound in Portuguese. She, unfortunately, was asking for some penis instead of some bread as a 16 year old. This is a common faux pas for English speakers who are learning to speaking Portuguese. Living in France I had my own set of faux pas, my second host brother felt very uncomfortable after I told him "I was going upstairs to have sex with myself" when I meant I was going upstairs to go to sleep. To use the verb "to sleep" apparently wasn't correct in this context. Now in Egypt, my family was looking for couscous. We were talking in Egypt and going all around this store talking about couscous. At the end of the day, we were recounting the story to an Egyptian friend who started laughing and told us to quiet down and say "coucous-E" because apparently in Arabic, couscous is a vulgar term for female genitalia. I think my whole family became a little red once we had realized we walked all around Alexandria talking about coucous that day!