Foreign Fun

Part of the fun of experiencing new cultures is to see how they manage to translate their words into the English language, or at least a distant cousin of it.

In Lisbon recently, the menu for a seafood-filled 'Spaghetti Mediterraneo' offered a delicious combination of 'octopus, shrimp, and selfish with oil', which was at once a source of laughter and a painful reminder of my hormonal teenage years.

The sign below was seen at a hotel gym in Carcavelos, not far from Lisbon but far from motivating. The 'need to use Snickers' to enter the gym seems a little counter-productive.

Just last night at Amsterdam's excellent Cafe Parck, a fantastic hamburger can be followed by the slightly less appetizing-sounding 'apple pie and wipe cream':

I'll be on the lookout for more - perhaps as my own form of payback for repeatedly massacring a few foreign languages myself in the past 12 months.