Parlez vous...huh?

In the course of my travels I have, as you would expect, accumulated quite a collection of guide books. They usually include some kind of mini phrase-book to help the traveller out as he tries to navigate his way about foreign lands. Buried in these phrase books it's not uncommon to find phrases which at first glance seem rather odd. Actually at second and subsequent glances too in many cases.

For example my guide to South America tells me how to say, "Help, there's something wrong with the brakes" though it's hard to conceive of circumstances where I would have both someone to say this to and the time to look it up in the book. Of course the same book tells me the Spanish for "Please call an ambulance" which might be handy a short time later.

My guide to Lao also includes this latter phrase but additionally, adopting a somewhat gloomier outlook, tells me how to ask, "Where is the nearest cemetery?"

Sometimes these things seem to give an insight into the things that occupy the collective national psyche, as in an Arabic guide in a book about Egypt which gives me translations for both "I need to check that with my chairman" and "We look forward to a mutually beneficial relationship" – phrases which hardly seem important for the casual traveller.

Food can also be a bit of a mystery as the guide book translations aren't necessarily all that useful. Knowing the Malay for "rice with odds and ends" doesn't mean that those odds and ends will be something palatable. For those who prefer their food rather fresher the phrase "do you have an ox", which I have in Malagasy, might do the trick and for after dinner entertainment there is always the Nepali for "Will you please dance for me", a phrase I was unwilling to try out when I was there for fear of it being a local euphemism inserted by a malicious guide book employee. It might of course be part of the mating rituals as indeed might the Chinese for "I think you look very pretty" though the Chinese for "I have lost my cat" could, perhaps, belong in the food and drink rather than the making friends section.

All of which is simply preamble to the point, which is that I have today bought a guide book for PDRK (North Korea) which gives me the two best phrases I have ever come across which I am absolutely certain will be winners with my hosts when I eventually get there in April. So, I'm off now to learn "Kim Il Sung really is the greatest communist fighter and true revolutionary" and "Yankees are wolves in human shape".

For those interested, the guide book, the only one I could find for the country, is one of the excellent Bradt series.