Lost in translation, vol. ?

The school's newspaper staff is hard at work on their third issue, which should be distributed sometime this week. Since it's (almost) February and the newspaper's target readership is a bunch of teenagers, we are of course having a love-themed issue.

One feature includes interviews with some "eligible bachelors" in grades 7-12. The interviews of course include teen-friendly questions about things like Valentine's Day gifts, romantic gestures, etc. One question was something along the lines of "if you had a date with a girl you liked on Valentine's Day, what would you do?"

One of the interviewees was a very nice 11th grade boy. The reporter had asked me to proofread her story, and all was fine until I got to this particular young man's answer to the aforementioned question.

It went something like this: "I'd take her out to a very nice dinner, bring her flowers and other gifts, maybe read her poetry, take a walk, and at the end of the date I'd shoot her."

Um.

What?!

I called the reporter over and asked her..."He'd shoot her?!"

She nodded, looking a bit confused at my alarm.

"Yeah, you know, like...shoot her?" she said, the wheels in her head obviously turning as she tried to think of another way to explain it to me. "Shoot her...like...so she'd say yes to being his girlfriend."

"You mean he'd ask her to be his girlfriend?" I asked.

"Yes! Yes, ask her, shoot her, you know, to be his girlfriend."

We changed the wording slightly. Hooray for slang phrases not translating so well.

In other news, we were driving down the toll road today on our way to Jakarta (we have today and Tuesday off...gotta love countries that observe holidays for all major world religions!) when suddenly Travis said, "Uh, there's an elephant!"

So there was. In the back of a truck up ahead was an elephant, happily flapping his ears and waving his trunk around in the breeze, looking as if he were enjoying his little excursion. Mind you, elephants in this part of the world are considerably littler than the huge African elephants, but still! An elephant is an elephant.

You just never know what you'll see here. Nothing surprises me anymore. Two guys and two goats on one small motorcycle? An elephant on the highway? Yep. Ah, I love Indonesia.