Foreign Students Allowed Back After Gaffe

AMSTERDAM - A group of Dutch students deported from Ukraine for announcing that they had come to "hunt" their tour guide were allowed back into the country after officials worked out that the threat was a mistranslation.

The students, arriving at a Ukrainian airport for a cultural trip, told border guards they were in the country to "hunt" — using a word that in Dutch can mean to seek out or pursue, in this case a guide who was supposed to meet them.

The guards heard it differently. The group was detained, questioned about what precisely they intended to hunt, and put on the next flight home — still insisting, as the door closed, that the guide was in the arrivals hall.

"They kept pointing at the door and saying 'the man we are hunting is behind it,'" a border official said. "Under the circumstances, it did not help."

The students flew home to the Netherlands, told their story to a local newspaper, and got an answer within days: the Ukrainian embassy, having worked out the confusion, apologized and issued fresh visas.

The guide, it emerged, had indeed been waiting in arrivals. He waited some time.

The students say they will go back — this time with a phrasebook, an interpreter, and a firm commitment to describe their relationship with the guide as "meeting," not "hunting."

"We have learned a valuable lesson about travel," one said. "Also about vocabulary."