I was watching The Tonight Show with Jay Leno the other night, one of my favorite late-night talk show because he has many yummy guests like Keanu Reeves, Aaron Eckhart and Evangeline Lily appearing on his show and the show is not dubbed in German. Thank GOODNESS! One of the guest that day was the very pregnant but extremely gorgeous Gillian Anderson.

She was talking about her life in London, her new The X-Files movie and also that she’s quite prone to committing faux pas in public and you should have seen her funny but embarrassed expression . There was this incident where she was supposed to present an award to Tom Jones.

She was backstage at an event, chatting with someone and suddenly an arrival of a huge entourage caught her attention. It turned out to be the oh-so-god-like-pair David and Victoria Beckham. Then she went over to greet the pair and she noticed that Victoria had her shirt collar turned up. All of a sudden, without thinking, she reached out to pull Victoria Beckham’s shirt collar down, the way normal people would wear their shirt collar. Err….only after Victoria walked away and gave her a strange look and saw her pulling back her collar up did she realized what she had done .

Well, I have my fair share of embarrassing moments too, something like caught-in-the-act-of-committing-faux pas kind of thing. I know that age is generally a sensitive topic for Germans. So the other day, I was chatting with some German friends and then someone casually mentioned something about World War II. Then as usual without thinking, I turned over to a friend, who’s quite young and asked him what his experiences were during those hard times in World War II. He turned over and looked at me with his eyes bulging and said ‘I beg your pardon? Do you know when did World War II start?‘

Actually I know that no one there was born during or before WWII and he thought that I think he’s that old. You see, sometimes I wish the floor below me will just crack open and swallow me up during those spur of foot-in-mouth moments . Luckily I have some good German friends who don’t bear grudges .

Now, I dare you to tell me one of yours as you’ve known one of my many faux pas .