Monday, December 24, 2007
Hej tomte gubbar slå i glasen
This morning at 6:21 am we got a call on one of our cellular phones, from the International number +46709622578. It was a text message, something that neither of us ever use or do. It woke me out of sleep. It read:
Hej tomte gubbar slå i glasen ….God jul! Krama alla! Ingela
I don't appreciate receiving phone calls like this. I have not activated text messaging on my phone because I was afraid of spam like this, especially this one, which looked like it came from outside my country, the United States. I wanted to find out who or what was responsible for the call.
I looked up 4, 46, and 467 as international country codes. Neither 4 nor 467 is such a code. But 46 is Sweden. So I am guessing that is where this call came from. I Googled the phone number but got no results. I tried to translate this from Swedish to English but that is hard to do since Babelfish does not include this language. There are several online translators available, but none of them would translate "gubbar" or "glasen". I got that "hej" was simply "Hey!" and that "tomte" is an elf of some sort. A German-Swedish dictionary translated it as "Gartenzwerg", or a garden dwarf. One dictionary translated "glasen" as "viele Danke!". "Jul" is Christmas, "krama" is embrace, and "alla" is all, and I am guessing that Ingela is someone's name.
So this looks like some sort of Christmas greeting. I looked up these words in Google images. The expression "Hej tomte gubbar slå i glasen" gave me a bunch of Christmas dwarfs or elves, as did "tomte". "gubbar" reminds me of the German "geben", and "slå" is "stand". So I get something like "Hey! Elves definitely give you thanks. Merry Christmas! To all!".
This may be a nice greeting, but I don't appreciate it being sent all over the place by cell phone. How did Ingela know the cell phone number anyway? It's a nice time to give season's greetings, but please not by text on phones.
Hej tomte gubbar slå i glasen ….God jul! Krama alla! Ingela
I don't appreciate receiving phone calls like this. I have not activated text messaging on my phone because I was afraid of spam like this, especially this one, which looked like it came from outside my country, the United States. I wanted to find out who or what was responsible for the call.
I looked up 4, 46, and 467 as international country codes. Neither 4 nor 467 is such a code. But 46 is Sweden. So I am guessing that is where this call came from. I Googled the phone number but got no results. I tried to translate this from Swedish to English but that is hard to do since Babelfish does not include this language. There are several online translators available, but none of them would translate "gubbar" or "glasen". I got that "hej" was simply "Hey!" and that "tomte" is an elf of some sort. A German-Swedish dictionary translated it as "Gartenzwerg", or a garden dwarf. One dictionary translated "glasen" as "viele Danke!". "Jul" is Christmas, "krama" is embrace, and "alla" is all, and I am guessing that Ingela is someone's name.
So this looks like some sort of Christmas greeting. I looked up these words in Google images. The expression "Hej tomte gubbar slå i glasen" gave me a bunch of Christmas dwarfs or elves, as did "tomte". "gubbar" reminds me of the German "geben", and "slå" is "stand". So I get something like "Hey! Elves definitely give you thanks. Merry Christmas! To all!".
This may be a nice greeting, but I don't appreciate it being sent all over the place by cell phone. How did Ingela know the cell phone number anyway? It's a nice time to give season's greetings, but please not by text on phones.
