Often, when folks travel to foreign destinations, misunderstandings can take a bizarre turn. In this instance, a language barrier created a pretty intense situation.
Over in Lisbon, Portugal, an unsuspecting tourist got caught up in a rather unusual predicament. What he thought was a simple order for a pomegranate at a local restaurant turned into something quite unexpected. Thanks to the language mix-up, he accidentally ended up requesting a grenade. As you can imagine, this peculiar mix-up caught the eye of the local police, leading to a full-blown terror alert.
A luckless tourist from Azerbaijan found himself surrounded by armed police and ordered to the floor in Caís de Sodré, Lisbon, after a translation app he used to request help in a restaurant confused “pomegranate” with “grenade”.
According to a story in Correio da Manhã today, the man suffered a “sudden indisposition” which led him to entering the Portugália restaurant, in the downtown area of Lisbon, and seeking some kind of sustenance.
A Russian speaker, but with an Israeli passport, the 36-year-old used an app on his mobile phone to write a sentence, in which it seems he was asking for something to do with pomegranate. Possibly a pomegranate juice?
Whatever the request, the app translated the Russian for pomegranate into the Portuguese ‘grenade’, which immediately set the waiter on alert.
Says the paper, aware of the country’s heightened terror threat, the waiter contacted PSP police, who arrived exceptionally quickly and in force.
I can only imagine how utterly terrifying this whole ordeal must have been for this poor guy.
Let this incident serve as a stark reminder for all of us to give our language skills a good polish before embarking on foreign journeys.
