T Shirts

This has been brewing for a while but what i saw this week takes the biscuit!

When I first got here I kept catching sight of diminutive Nica girls and women who looked like they wouldn’t say boo to a goose, sporting t-shirts with really brash English phrases emblazoned on them... Yes I am good in bed... I’m the best – forget the rest... Don’t Touch... I can only please one person a day etc... After a while I became certain that they had no idea what these t-shirts said, and then I noticed that there are hundreds of second-hand clothes shops in Nicaragua. Hundreds. Too many for it just to be the discarded garments of Nicaraguans... it all comes from the US, seconds and goodwill. Hence the brash phrases. But the funniest, this week in little old Yali – Stop Staring – take a picture it lasts longer. On a fairly wizened old crone who was staring at me!!!

Obviously some people have worked out that some of these slogans might not be something they want to be associated with, cos when I was in a shop in Matagalpa a while ago i was approached by a respectable looking lady who asked me to translate a t-shirt. "Chocolate makes me smile". She explained that she wanted to buy it for work and didn’t want to offend.

And - yet more - at the time of going to press I had just seen the trainee priest wearing a picture of two moose and the slogan "Nice Rack".