Skip to main content

Chinese

I had a funny encounter today.

When I was handing out fliers promoting Earth Hour 2012 so a pair of middle-aged, respectable-looking office men on the pavement and blabbing to them about how I was a volunteer and please support Earth Hour blah blah blah, they replied to me:

“我们是中国人，我们不。。。懂。”

At this point I was kind of like half suspicious, because I didn´t hear the Chinese accent and he took some time to remember the word 懂, but for the sake of professionalism (and showing off, maybe) I replied to them:

“你们是中国人？这是世界的。。。”

At this moment the traffic light turned green and they crossed the road while I was trying to figure out how to say "Earth Hour" in Chinese (世界的小时？哈哈). They probably said something or laughed or something like that because afterwards my volunteer friends said "They are Vietnamese, and they were just joking with you", and from then my suspicion was confirmed.

Funny encounter, you may say, but there are some points worth taking note of:
- First of all, my Chinese "switch" is definitely not "usable", yet. If those people were pretending to be English or Americans or Singaporeans or some citizenship that speaks English, I would have knocked it out of the park lol.
- Secondly, er I don't really know what the second point is, I guess now I'm just wondering what those 2 thought about me or the situation. They messed with the wrong person... Hahaha OK not really because my Chinese was super broken anyway.

Surprises come to you when you least expect them. :)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's another New Year!

If you know me, you know that I don't usually do new year's resolutions. Because what is time but a social construct? Like ok, I see the point, and if it helps to motivate people into doing things, good for them. But I've never been the kind of person that is able to follow through with something if I plan them too rigorously. But then again, now that I'm 5.5 years into the corporate life, I realise that planning is important, and not even for the kind of big picture capitalist goals/visions/missions thing that companies do, but even for the day to day kind of work, because of how technologies have created this need to be super 'efficient' and 'productive'. Sometimes I wish that writing a blog post like this could be considered 'productive' as well in this capitalist world, because then I may be more motivated to write more than one post per year. Remember the time that I wanted to write one blog post per week and I wrote like 5 posts? Lol. Anywa
Post a Comment
Read more

Life in quarantine

Ah hello, it's been a while. Not that anyone visits this blog anymore lol. But it's still good to be able to write things out some time. So we're entering the third week of lockdown here in Singapore. Yes it is a lockdown despite what the formal term is. And me, being a good citizen and law-abiding non-Singaporean, is staying at home. Thank you e-commerce and delivery services (as well as frontliners and health workers, of course). It's interesting to see how things are panning out, at least from the way people are reacting to this. For me personally, I really don't mind being at home for most of my week, but I do enjoy the very rare trips to the convenience stores nearby or just to check my mails downstairs. I've grown increasingly lazy to even go out to a supermarket and buy actual grocery - luckily my roommates will be happy to help. Generally I do feel that people are frustrated because they don't have a choice - das ist nicht freiwillig! (Yes I
Post a Comment
Read more

2019

Just realised that I posted a post for 2020 planning/goals/whatever you want to call those like 1 month ago. Which makes me posting a 2019 reflections post at this moment kind of random lol but it's my blog so I do whatever I want. Nothing too fancy, just want to lay out some achievements and other highlights of 2019: Jan - switched to a role with more responsibilities. Started training phase Feb - went home for Tết Mar - qualified for Breakfast Club. KL trip was fun April - got promoted May - good start to the Consultant life, another Breakfast Club qualification. Didn't know what would hit me next lol Jun - shit month at work Jul - meh month at work Aug - first time being a groomsman Sep (craziest month) - first time being a bridesmaid and wedding emcee (the day after being a groomsman. Went on leave for 10 days on one of the best trips of my life to Japan and came back getting Consultant of the Month Oct - some severe post-travel depression that led to an improm
Post a Comment
Read more