Friday, August 14, 2009

Love Purade

I am back from three days in Kyiv, working on my consulting project. for two nights, I rented a rennovated studio flat on Red Army Street (it has a new name now but the street signs are still old) for less than $40 USD per night. It was fully furnished including fancy sheets with hearts. The hearts had little sayings in English - Love to Love, Two Hearts, Broken Hearted and (the winner) Love Purade

I also have a Genuine Certitied Rolex from the former Silk Alley in Beijing and a Bruse Springsteen album from a street vendor in Kyiv.

I see lots of T-shirts here with English words on them, seemingly chosen at random, usually spelled correctly but totally meaningless in combination. It is for effect only, I guess.

There is a story from years back about a woman who knitted a sweater for herself and incorporated three Chinese characters into the design, which she had seen on a menu in a restaurant. A friend of hers who was Chinese burst out laughing when he saw her in the sweater as it read "Cheap but delicious".

4 comments:

  1. I've even heard of English speakers getting tattoos with Oriental characters that had very different meanings than what they thought. I would like to see some of those t-shirts.

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  2. "Love Purade"! Brilliant.

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  3. Snowbrush, thanks for the comment. Tattoos would be real fun to have wrong. I'd want to bring a friend with me or have the characters vetted first, I think.
    The T-shirts are pretty funny sometimes. I saw one with a fake Live Performance Itinerary for some rock band. It was a recipe for something. I'll try to jot down some of teh strange word combinations and blog them when I get a few collected.

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  4. Absolutely amazing! I have the same on my bed cover. Im currently residing in Minsk, so im guessing my wifes grandmother bought them from Ukraine. I just saw "Love purade", and decided to google it, and your side was the first to come up ;P Just thought i'd tell!

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