The Jumping Frog and Babel

Welcome back. It’s been three weeks now and a lot has been going on. I’ll update in bite-sized chunks. It’s only four days now until I fly back to Brussels and start work again after a leave of six months. I can’t say I’m looking forward to it very much.

Mark Twain wrote a short story once about a jumping frog. He included it in a second anthology as a translation into English from a translation into French, with an attack on the Gallic language and its literary reviewers. I noticed that somebody in Italy had recently used Google to translate this website into their language. So I translated that version back into English using the same software and got:

As to kill time to Bangkok

It has been of five days of it appeal to-pleasure-hunting with Gus, posterior part still from the Laos. We have been to the restaurants Headquarters-Orientals and Japanese, the Irish banns and the Korean bars, the barbecue of the way, the bookshops, the cinematografi and the uneven place with a name like “Spanky” or “one night to Bangkok” in order to watch the human traffic.

• Squali of the blow to the world of the ocean of the Siam.
• They contemplate to go to the church to sing the carols, then change idea when, on I consult of the website ones of the church, you do not see nothing but the photos of small army of Institutors of the women white women-haired who ago the good actions.
• It carries out immense, a study detailed and comparable of the malls of shopping de Bangkok. Vibration chair is based in a store of electronics in one while watching one television $60000. It admires Ferraris and Bentleys on the concourse (you do not obtain that one to Bluewater) and eats the pastry shops imported cream cooked from a chef French with a famous face.
• It reads something from Paul Theroux (witty) or Michael Palin (verbose.)
• It drinks the tea of the mint and smoke one sheesha in little Arabia.

Beer or three is met me with Jerry Hopkins for one. Jerry has written the biography of Jim Morrison, nobody exits alive and is hour here a resident of long duration de Bangkok. It possesses a house upcountry with its moglie but it passes the greater part of its time in the city, that it has telephone lines. After a brace of the beers in its appartment we have gone to one bar. It was empty beyond we but there was traffic through the bar. Salt-job bar is transparent was one. “they do not sell the a.lot of beer,” Jerry here said. Therefore, been born them happy.

Mrs K will arrive after tomorrow so as to the free-time to modernize this will be to a prize. It will control or two times once within, however. I have of I have of I have and all that one.