Stupid TouristsWhat's the stupidest thing you've ever heard a tourist say? Ever heard an American talking about visiting "Scotchland, England", or (and this one is actually real) a Japanese couple talking about the correct way to say Clapham is actually Clatham, as "ph" sounds are pronounced "th". Which has a certain logic really. UPDATE: Please, no more Loogabarooga stories. It's getting like, "and I opened my eyes and my mum had left me a cup of tea!"
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chthonic, Thu 7 Jul 2005, 16:31)
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Limited Polish vocabularyAbout ten years ago my parents packed the family car and we all drove to Poland for summer vacation. We had made the assumption that we could probably get by in English (improbable) and German (more probable) but in the end we resorted to playing charades and using a handfull of Polish words that we picked up along the way.
I probably misspell these words but I think you will all agree that the words "pivo" (beer), "voda" (water) and "lody" (ice cream) will take you a long way.
Also, we picked up that "prosch" means something like "here you go". Not knowing how to say thank you in Polish, we would reply in German at first, but eventually my father resolved that he might as well reply in our native tongue (Danish). However, this word ("tak") just happened to mean "yes" in Polish.
Before I figured this out, we had puzzled many a waiter by the following conversation:
Waiter: Here you go
Tourist: Yes
Not a very polite reply. Not really stupid either, but it did give me a good laugh in the end.
(I later looked up how to say "thank you", it appears that the correct word is something in the lines of the Russian "spaziba". Oh well).
(, Thu 14 Jul 2005, 8:23, Reply)
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