Being a tourist in a country where you don’t speak the language can be rather intimidating, with a slip-up potentially causing absolute chaos. A tourist from Azerbaijan became surrounded by armed police while in Portugal after a translation app he used to request help in a restaurant confused the word “pomegranate” with “grenade.”
The man suffered a “sudden indisposition,” which caused him to enter the restaurant Caís de Sodré in Lisbon, Portugal, looking for assistance. The 36-year-old Russian speaker attempted to use an app on his mobile phone to write a sentence where he tried to ask for something to do with pomegranate.
Instead of doing so, the app translated the Russian word for pomegranate into “grenade” in Portuguese, which frightened the waiter. They ended up calling PSP police, who arrived quickly to stop the tourist.
The man was handcuffed and taken to a nearby police station as authorities went on to search his hostel in Lisbon, where they found nothing incriminating. Fortunately, the tourist was freed after the misunderstanding but he is probably scarred from his mistake while in the country.