Right now I’m desperately searching for stories, lists, and one-liners about tourists, local customs and language (most especially where they conflict). If anyone could help me out either by sharing one of their stories or tossing a link my way to someone else’s, I’d be much obliged.
This was just a quickie little funny—
We went to Vegas to get married, and while there we visited the Hoover Dam. Wen we pulled into the parking area, the attendant took our money, and handed us a brochure.
He said, in his thick Aussie accent and a grin on his face, “Here’s your dam information, so to speak, mate!”
Well, it cracked us up!
I recall right after Sept 11th some funny discriminatory fully body/baggage searches.
For your amuse ment, or are we being interviewed for ‘the record’, an article or something you’re writing?
Well my GF and I just went to Vegas with another couple.
There was a SNAFU with our luggage tags, so we had to wait at a luggage conveyor for a while.
Some clown with a big plastic Samsonite suitcase puts it on the conveyor belt. This thing is huge, and it has wheels on the bottom. And this guy places it upright on the belt (wheels down).
This normally wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but the conveyor belt went along for about 15 feet and then went down hill at a rather steep angle for at least 15-20 feet.
So the guy puts the suitcase on the conveyor nd walks away. We all watch with glee as the suitcase rocketed down the incline at a high rate of speed and crashed at the bottom.
It’s the simple things that maky you laugh at 5:15 in the morning after 3 hours sleep!
MtM
Its for a humorous speech I’ve been asked to give tommorow (nothing like last minute prep, eh?). Names, etc. are hardly necessary. I’m looking more for conflict with local customs and language (doesn’t have to be a foreign country per se).
Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but:
I was living in Croatia and was trying to learn some of the langauge. I had managed to memorize a few key phrases, “hello my name is . . .” etc and often people would respond with–and pardon my spelling but I will approximate–“oh, govorush malo Hrvatski.” Well, I knew that “govorush” means you speak and Hrvatski was “Croatian” but I didn’t know what “malo” meant. I had studied romance languages and thought it meant “bad.” “God,” I thought, “people are telling me I speak their language badly? Yeah, no kidding, but I am trying here. Give me a break, people.” I was pretty pissed off about it and finally ranted to a friend, who promptly cracked up. He told me, “MALO means ‘a little’ in Croatian. They weren’t insulting you, they were COMPLIMENTING you.” Yeah, I felt like an idiot. Not the first time.
Here’s a story from my brother. I forget the country and the language, but you’ll get the idea. I’m thinking it’s Mexico and Spanish, though.
Tourist walks into a bar and tries his best in Spanish to ask, “I’m looking for the Bay of the Angels.”
Tourist mispronounces Bay of Angels and ends up asking, “I’m looking for the Vagina of the Angels.”
The three Mexicans at the bar reply, “So are we, man.” They continue to laugh so hard that they have to get up and leave.
Before using that in a speech, I’d try to verify that it’s a possible mistake to make in Spanish.
My wife and I were recently on a trip to Block Island. Thats Block Island…right…
Ok, we are sitting on the upper deck of the ferry getting us out to the island. We are on our way to visit friends. One of the deck hands comes up to check out the view and get some fresh air. A woman walks up to him and asks…
"…excuse me sir…"
Deck hand: “Yes ma’am…what can I do for you”
Woman: *"Does the water go all the way around the Island??
Deck Hand: trying to hold back from bursting out laughing [he remained remarkably calm] "*Yes Ma’am…the water does go all the way around the ISLAND!!
HEH!
Once while I was doing field work in Australia, I made my customary weekly visit to the local grocery store for supplies. I was feeling in need of a change from my usual luncheon goodies when I spied what I assumed was a small roll of liverwurst. It was in the refrigerated case next to other cold cuts like mettwurst, it was wrapped in a gold matte wrapper like liverwurst often is here, and the diameter of the roll was about right for sandwich cold cuts. It wasn’t labeled - I mean, not a single word anywhere on the wrapper - but I didn’t think twice about it.
The next day, back at camp, I decided to make myself a liverwurst sandwich. Disappointment #1 - when I cut open the roll, the consistency of the stuff inside was clearly not that of liverwurst, but very much like baloney. Okay, I’m not a big baloney fan, but I bought it, I’ll eat it. Disappointment #2 - I took a break later to eat my lunch, and discovered that the baloney had all the taste of saw dust. Zero flavor, not a hint of any sort of spice or anything. I spit out my mouthful and didn’t bother to finish the sandwich, and later threw away the entire roll as a lost cause.
A few weeks later, I was joined for a few days by a colleague that had lived in Australia as a boy. One evening I bitched to him about this horrible Aussie baloney I’d tried. He stared at me for a minute, asked me to describe again what the “baloney” had looked like, and then practically fell off his camp stool, laughing. “You were eating DOG SAUSAGE!! BWHA HA HA HA HA HA!”
No more purchases of unlabeled products for me… :o
Here are a couple from my first trip to Germany. I was there for work, and one weekend a group of us decided to do a road trip to see some castles.
- We researched these maps and figured out our route (we were all engineers), but didn’t take into account 1) all the distances were in km, not miles and 2) on the autobahn we could travel warp factor 7. So the planned 5+ hour trip only took around 2 hours.
- Having so overestimated the travel time, we left at around 5AM. We had worked the night before, so we were kind of tired and the non-drivers planned on napping on the ride. But something about travelling close to light speed kept all of us wide awake !
All eyes were glued to the road ahead just to make sure the driver didn’t miss anything. It was pretty funny to see such attentive passengers. - Once we got off the autobahn (where there is no speed limit), we continued our as-fast-as-the-rental-car-could-go pace on this country road. Until we came across this sign indicating “100 km/hr. bei nasse”. We slowed down to 100km/hr as two of us frantically searched through our German/English dictionaries to decipher “bei nasse”. We did notice that we continued to be passed by other cars still in hyper-drive. We all busted up laughing when we realized that all those passing cars were likely cursing us tourists for not understanding what “when wet” means !
Despite having married a German woman, my dad never did understand more than a few words of German. Once while we were visiting in Germany, my Mom sent him across the street to the grocery store to get some bottles of beer for the guests who were expected the next day. He found the beer just fine but when the clerk asked him something, my dad just answered “ja, ja” like he usually did without understanding a word except “bier.” He was surprised when the clerk whipped out a bottle opener and popped the caps off of every bottle in a flash. He never just said "ja, ja’ again but from then on one of us kids had to go shopping with him.
A girl I knew once was travelling in Greece and ran into a few “ahem” difficulties. As she climbed onto a bus in Athens, her eyes swept over the crowd and met the glance of every other passenger. That was mistake number one. Apparently, where she was from, this was the polite and respectful thing to do. In Greece, however, it’s a rather direct come-on.
As she was nicely-shaped and had a beautiful face, she was quickly surrounded by amorous Greek men who were responding to her inadvertant invitation. When one or two of them began to grope her she swatted at their hands and shouted “No! No!”. That was mistake number two. In Greece, our word “no” sounds very much like ne, their word for “yes.” When you mean “no”, you say okee (sounds a lot like “okay”).
Once she got back to her hotel she had to get several of her larger male friends to form a bodyguard squad to prevent her new “fan club” from bothering her again.
While teaching in Taiwan, I’d go to the same little restaurant every day for a bowl of noodles and Wonton soup. The Chinese for wonton is Hwun Dun, but I’d ask for Hwun Dan - rectum soup. The laoban would kind of smirk at me, but I figured he was just nervous at having a foreigner in his joint. Rectum soup’s not bad once you aquire the taste…
My friends had the following conversation in Germany.
K= “Oh look at that beautiful plate!” (Pointing out a plate in a display cabinet.
L= “Why don’t you buy it?”
K= “Well I’d have to ask the saleslady for it, and I can’t remember the word for plate.”
L= “Tell 'er.”
K= “I can’t, I don’t remember the word for plate.”
L= “Tell 'er!”
K= “I. Can’t. Tell. Her. I don’t remember the word for plate!”
L= “Teller! Teller is the German word for plate, Dummy! Sheesh.”
I believe after that exchange K was too embarrassed to ask for the plate.
I heard this second-hand and so cannot swear to anything.
Apparently there was this (English-speaking) fellow traveling on a train somewhere in China. He was going to drink from a plastic cup, but when he picked it up he realized it was cracked. He said to himself, “That’s a bit poor!” and everyone around him started trying to talk to him, because what he had said sounded just like “This cup is broken” in Chinese.
(Disclaimer–I have asked Chinese speakers about this, and no one could think of a variation of the phrase that would work in Chinese, but it makes a good story.)
Warning: this is not as funny as I think it is, especially when you read it. I can tell it pretty funny, but can’t type it worth a shit!
I travelled around Brazil for about a year a long time ago. I had to learn Portuguese to make myself understood. Folks down there would tell me that “officially” the Portuguese alphabet didn’t have “K” and “X” (pronounced “shees”) wasn’t really used much. This, of course, was in stark contrast to the myriad of words you would encounter everyday with these letters in them. Maybe they did it on purpose to confuse us Yankees. They also like to slip as much english in as possible, while still claiming they invented whatever it is they are using “our” word to describe. But overall a wonderful group of people, really.
Anyway, one day, a buddy and I were cruising around the streets, trying to stay out of trouble when we decided to grab a bite to eat. We went into a little cafe and scoped out the menu. They had all the local favs, and an impressive selection of burgers. They had “Hamburger”, “Hamburger Especial”, “Hamburger Deluxe” and a curious item called “X Burger”. Humm…
Well, being rich imperialists, I wasn’t going for the plain one. I figured the “Especial” had something good going for it, and the “Deluxe” must really be the cat’s pajamas. But what was this “X Burger”? How did it rate ahead of the “Deluxe”?
We asked! We asked! In the best portuguese I could muster, I asked, “What is this ‘X Burger’?”
The waiter looked at us (his expression was Classic!) like we were the thickest rubes to ever fall off the cane truck (more popular than turnips down there I imagine) and says, “X Burger! X Burger! What? You never heard of X Burger?”, shakes his head and walks off.
:rolleyes’ Ah, a hamburger with Cheese. A “sheese” Burger.
Unfortunately, I apparently can’t link directly to a thread (or don’t know how to do so), but go to www.fodors.com , then pick the “europe” discussion boards, (apparently the other aren’t that fun), down the page on the right, then run a search with “funniest”, or some similar adequate words. You must register, though, but it’s free.
I made the search and though any instance of “funniest” in a post will turn out as a result, I nevertheless found on the first page the following threads :
“does anyone has a funny story about getting lost in Europe?” (123 posts)
“funniest thing heard one say while travelling anywhere?” (101 posts)
“funniest experience while driving in Europe?” (22 posts)
“your funniest travel experience” (76 posts)
Now, I can’t guarantee that all the anecdotes will actually be fun.
Besides, people are going to believe I’m paid to advertize for this site…
down the page, on the ** left ** , sorry.
Not a story about language, but I was amused, none the less.
I was in Amsterdam last year with some friends, and we stopped for dinner at this Argentinian steak house. I ordered the cheeseburger, and then asked “What kind of cheese does that come with?”
“It’s cheese.”
“Yeah, but what kind?”
The waiter stared at me with blank incomprehension, then said, “White cheese.”
I looked at my friends, and said, “Now I know how the French feel.”
On one of my first trips into the deep chinese countryside, I asked a couple of peasants (in Mandarin) how to get to the bus station.
peasant1: huh
China guy: which way to the bus station?
peasant2: huh
CG: how do I get to the bus station?
peasant1: huh
CG: where’s the bus station?
peasant2: huh
CG (english): fuck it, I’ll find it myself
as I walked away
peasant1: I coulda sworn that white guy was speaking Chinese and asking what way to the bus station
peasant2: ya, me too, damndest thing huh?