Lost In Translation

If there’s one category that stands out as the most fertile ground for LiTs, it has to be the hotel fire notice. Robert Treharne Jones has spotted this gem in Beijing:

Please don’t worry if a fire is occurring. We hotel have owned succor scattering facilities to sure you transmitted safely.

Mrs Croker has a refreshingly silly sense of humour, so I knew she’d laugh at this, sent in by Alan Baker of Australia:

On blackboard outside cafe, Istanbul: Chicken tits – hot as hell

I wasn’t wrong.

… you just can’t see what they were getting at. An advert for an apartment to rent in Barcelona proclaims: I have an educated affluent small dog.

Do email me if you can work out what they meant …

Sterling research work from Ulrike Parker in Germany, who spotted this on the packaging for a Chinese duster:

Grease removing - Softness - Bibulousness

No plasm - No shrinking - high strength

Sewing at warp-winse and crosswise by combining high-density natural fibre surface with the best soft interior lay, it features solid and deformation with the best using effect.

Merci beaucoup to Louise Brown, who spotted this hotel gem in the French capital:

We thank you for agreeing to put by ground the bathroom linen which you wish to make wash.

My weekend visit to Barcelona was disappointingly free of LiTs - until the last minute, when the stunning church of La Sagrada Familia stepped nobly up with their petition about a proposed rail route:

… they will ask the competent organisms to study another alternative route.

A great article from Ben Macintyre in The Times the other day, pointing out that he’d had similar experiences to mine at the Great Wall of China. I particularly liked Please walk carefully on abrupt slope and dangerous way.

You can read the piece here.

Happy New Year, and many thanks for the e-mails from everyone who received the books as Christmas presents. Particular thanks to John Beadle - until now my favourite Indian LiT had been the jar of jam labelled ‘contains no fruit whatsoever’, but it’s been surpassed by this extract from the country’s Highway Code:

We should not drive in the drinking mood and with the worries of the mind. At the time of driving, we should not accompany by ladies. If we do it so, it will create accident.

A (slightly belated) merry Christmas to everyone - and as a small gift may I offer this Bangkok restaurant speciality, kindly supplied by Geoff Foster Taylor:

Lack of lamb

The French gite notice has been soliciting chuckles aplenty from friends - so thought I’d share a little more of it with you …

DOMESTIC ORDURES

They must be go down between 19pm and 22pm. If exist an ordures-sheath, don’t throw into the sheath, nor bottles, nor voluminous objects, nor liquids and heavy objects or encombrus.

Debris must be enveloped.