Language-again

When I lived up in arctic Lapland, I for some time managed a service station. It was a combined petrol station with a quite large store area with mostly car spare parts but also a quite large section with food.

The patrons of the store was mainly "normal" people, but once in a while you got in people that could not speak Swedish very well.

It could be Samis, tourists or the "LKAB Fnnish" speaking people. Now the LKAB- Finns are pecurilar. They consist of people that never really had learned any Swedish at all. It's not Finnish either- in it's own meaning, but a pecurliar mix of Finnish, Swedish, English and German.

(Note: LKAB is a very big mining company)

The people in the mine allmost exclusively speaks this "pigin" language and some never learn to speak proper Swedish (or Finnish- or any other language) at all.

By the way. The LKAB mine is quite cool. I believe they are down to 1200 meters at this point. The "Mammoth trucks are aewsome and there are four lane roads going everywhere. They have a cafeteria which goes under the name "Hard Rock Café" at the 550 meter level!

Anyway; this guy came in to the service station one day in January. He's in his sixties and are one of the typically persons that can't speak proper Swedish. (Or any other language).

He asks me: Vassarumättarikollapåliköli? Roughly translated to English it would be something like:"Wherrearrrthemettertolookaththhelikole?"

I went: Huh?

He then repeated his question twice more, me going "HUH?" every time.

I thought about it for a while and because I'm cunning (pointing to my biceps) and strong (pointing to my head), I got the idéa that "Why dont I just take him for a stroll down the aisles? Sooner or later he must find what he is looking for"

So, there we went off in to unknown territorys.

After a while the patron got tired and shouted to me: "Wherrarrrthemettertolookathhelikole?"

At this time I got somewhat desperate. But I started to think (finally), I remembered that Finnish speaking costumers for some reson pronouced glycole as "liköl", so I asked him if he wanted to use the glycole meter. His answer was "Ye´I tol´yo´so from the begin´".