My little sister and brother both have birthdays in the next two weeks. Laura and I thought that they would be interested in receiving Russian birthday cards. On Tuesday, we were in the city for language lesson and we thought we would swing by the store and pick up a few cards. We knew the translations of the key words: brother, sister, happy birthday... so we were set.
We bought two cards. One said "To my sister" on the front and the other said "Happy birthday means it's time to..." with several cute, animated frogs saying some verb we didn't know on the front. We assumed it meant "to celebrate" or party or something like that. On the two cards, there were only a handful of words that we didn't know (which is a lot better than usual) and we thought we got the gist of them.
We came back and showed the cards to one of our Russian, English-speaking friends. She said they were really cute. We asked for literal translations and were informed that one said: "To my sister... from mother's favorite daughter." Oops. She didn't think that was too big of deal because: "They can't read Russian anyway." We also found out what the frogs were saying. They were saying "To get drunk, to get drunk, to get drunk." Who would have thought that those cute little frogs would say such uncouth things? Anyway, I took out my trusty sharpie and crossed out the words in the dialogue bubbles and wrote in the verb "to celebrate" and all is well. We hope they like them.
Dave
