For example the town i live is ‘Twinned’ with a random town in France, but there are many local towns twinned with other towns all over Europe beyond.
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There are often school trips and other visits organized, so that people get to know each other.
Here’s a fun story about my former home-town of Cologne, which is twinned with Turin in Italy, and with Turku in Finland.
One quirk of the Finnish language is that in the genitive form there can be a lot of changes to the word stem – unlike English, there the genitive of Turku would be ‘Turku’s’, in Finnish that becomes ‘Turun’, which, incidentally, sounds a lot like ‘Turin’ …
One day, the partnership office in the town hall got a message from some “Turun laulamiehet” (Turku’s men choir) that they are planning a visit, and since they don’t speak German, if they could provide an interpreter …
Of course, the city name was misread, and they were welcomed by an Italian interpreter, who unsurprisingly couldn’t really help them at all 🙂
The town hall officials then called up the university if they had someone to help out, and they sent their Finnish-teacher, who also told me this story of his heroic rescue 😀
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