My Chinese Mother

A place to record the wonderfully funny things my Chinese Mother says and does, so I will always remember them...

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Winter time Strangler

Today my friend Michele shared these Chinglish / Engrish signs with me.  I find it funny that my American friends laugh at these signs and don't even live with anyone Chinese, so they don't get to enjoy the entire spectrum of why these translations are SO funny.  Trying to figure out what my mom is actually saying is part of the comedy experience.

We just had our first BIG snowfall of the year.  Vail Mountain opens on Friday and Beaver Creek opens the following week.

Whenever it snows, my mom always reminds me that I live in a dangerous place, those Colorado mountains!  Even though she's been here thousands of times, to hear her describe the drive to my house, you'd think it was a six hour ordeal, on a one way dirt road, covered with a sheet of ice, with a 1,000 ft. drop off cliff on both sides....and white out driving conditions...24 hours a day/365 days a year.

When I first started driving in the snow on my own, my mom used to tell me that she always had a pair of boots, an extra coat, a blanket, gloves and water in her car in case she got strangled somewhere.  The people where she worked had been puzzled about this for YEARS.  They would keep asking her why she'd need those things if she was strangled.  She just figured they were OBVIOUSLY very stupid not to be prepared for such things.

When my mom told ME that I better be prepared in case I got strangled somewhere, after I finally caught my breath from laughing so hard, I had to give her a little language lesson on the difference between "strangled" and "stranded".

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