Masseuse Missionaries

Getting ready to give a massage.

As a missionary teaching in Portugese:

Me: Temos uma massagem para voce. (We have a massage for you.)
Other missionary: Quer dizer mensagem? (Do you mean message?)
Me: Oh, yeah.

-Dagny Kelsey

Chubby with a Good Constitution

Mixing languages can make for some pretty humorous situations, such as the following from Love Actually (sorry for the bad language in the first clip and the horrible quality of the second):











Thanks to Michael Tsai for the submission.

Singing in Pain

Is Diverticulitis what you get from eating Korean food?

My father speaks Korean, and he taught me to say "baega parumnidah" (내 배가 부르고있다), a cute, folksy expression to say that the food was very good (literally, it means, "My stomach is singing"). One time I was eating at a Korean restaurant with my father. The food was very good, so when the Korean owner asked how I liked the food, I confidently said my phrase. The owner frowned and had a sincere look of concern on her face. Turns out, what came out of my mouth was a lot closer to "baega apahabnidah" (배가 큰 고통입니다), which means, "My stomach is in great pain."

-Joel Roman

To help with our Korean, (Google Translate isn't always the best), email us at blabbergastedblog AT gmail DOT com. Also, sorry for the delay in posts. Hopefully we'll be back up and posting regularly. Please send us your stories or ask your friends for stories to share with us!

TMI

Did you say what I think you just said?

While serving a Mormon mission in the Philippines, I was transferred to another of 80 islands that spoke a different dialect. When I tried to explain that I did not understand their dialect with the one that I roughly knew, I actually said (in a very crude and broken up way) that I had very little pubic hair.

-Sean Holcomb

Show Me Your Fleas

Not a flea.

One day while walking with someone, I decided to do a thumbs up and say, "pulgas arriba." My friend proceeded to laugh and hold up his hands, pinching his index finger and thumb together as if holding an extremely small object while saying, "pulgas arriba." Turns out, the word for thumb is "pulgar," and "pulgas" means "fleas."

-Trent Newman

The Proper Care and Feeding of Old Women

While teaching in Spanish about Peter's conversation with Christ, I accurately said, "Feed my sheep" the first two times, but the third time, "sheep" ("ovejas") came out as "viejas." According to my words, Peter was told to feed "my old women."

-Elder Douglas Higham (thanks to Alyson Morris and Lawrence Severson for clearing up sources)

Only One Way Out of This Mess

Start Looking.

Two missionaries parked their car on a street in Germany before going to a meeting. Upon leaving the meeting, they could no longer find their car and called a local church member in hopes that he could look up the name of the street where they parked and direct them to it. Proud that they had at least taken note of the name of the street, they announced to the local member, "It was on Einbahnstraße." Little did they know that "Einbahnstraße" means "one-way street."

-Michelle Glauser

And a Blabbergasted personal side note: co-founder Autumn is having surgery today. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.