Yesterday evening as my husband and I were walking on the public beach a few miles from our US home, we came upon a 20-foot-long message someone had drawn in the sand. "Jesus Love's U!" it proclaimed.
"How could anyone conceivably put an apostrophe in loves? Is our educational system that bad?" I exclaimed. As I set to rubbing out the offending mark with my feet, my Croatian-born, Serb husband stood stood to one side staring at the end of the message. Finally he asked in a slightly strained voice, "What does U mean?"
"You. As in me and you. It's the text message way of spelling it." "Oh", he said relieved. "Where I come from that means Ustashe."
He thought Nazi-aligned, Serb-hating fascists might be posting messages on our beach!
It's less unlikely than one might think because the political descendants of fascism are currently on the rise in Croatia, Austria and Germany. And, our hometown beach is in an area tourists and immigrants visit on their tour of America. We run into former Croatian and Bosnian visitors often enough for it to be unremarkable.
Luckily, though, this message was just from a dumb American.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
The educational system over here (in England) is just as bad. It's not even shocking to see that kind of mistake anymore.
Never mistakenly thought that 'U' might stand for UstaĊĦe, though. Not many of them on the South Coast of England :-)
Rosemary, I love your blog, you have such a wonderful perspective on Serbian culture which allows you to see the humor in how different and similar our cultures are!
My mechanic's name is Jesus, and I always thank him for loving everyone so much. He thinks it is funny.
Thank you for your wonderful posts, I always look forward to rearding them.
Long time, no blogs? I don't think one would find religious messages at EU topless "socialist" beaches :-)
Post a Comment